The 2009 Pwnie Nominee For Most Innovative Research

MD5 considered harmful today

Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Weger

Get a bunch of hackers and academic cryptographers together, and look what they do: They break the Internet. Employing advances in generating chosen-prefix collisions in MD5, a cluster of PlayStation 3s, and a web-based manipulation of a Certificate Authority that had been using MD5 well past its usefulness, this crack team was able to make their own trusted rogue Certificate Authority certificate that is trusted by all common web browsers.

MD5 considered harmful today