Full version of SHA-1 Broken

According to PDF document found on MIT's web server and backed by Bruce Schneier, credible evidence has been presented that the hash algorithm called SHA-1 has been broken. A collision search attack found by a trio of Chinese researchers makes breaking the algorithm much easier. Previously a brute force attack would take about 2**80 operations to complete while with this new attack only 2**69 operations are required. This doesn't necessarily the algorithm is completely unusable because it would still take a normal PC (Intel, AMD, ect..) system many months to successfully pull of this attack on only a single hash. But this does mean that governments and organizations with incredibly resources and deep pockets can have supercomputers break hashes at a much quicker rate.

See Schneier on Security for more information.