12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
12:39 p.m.
There are known Collision Attacks for the MD5SUM method of hashing, so it is possible to modify a file and make it have the same MD5SUM as another file. See this link for details on Collision Attacks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack
Recommendation from the US-CERT concerning MD5SUM hashes:
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/836068
Based on the above information, the CentOS team will be using sha256sum (sha-2) and not md5sum to generate future hashes for posting on our e-mail announcements to the CentOS Announce Mailing List.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes The CentOS Project