Generic collision attacks on hash-functions and HMAC

Over the last two or three years there has been a huge amount of interest in hash-function specific collision attacks. In this talk we will consider a slightly different problem, namely the difficulty of finding a collision for an arbitrary hash-function, i.e. using methods which work regardless of how the internals of the hash-function are designed. The results suggest that finding collisions for hash-functions may be slightly easier than was previously believed. The implications of this for applications of hash-functions including HMAC are explored