Researchers at Google and CWI have been the first to create a practical collision attack against the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function. Previously a collision was only possible in theory with the premise that a significant amount of computing power would be necessary to generate a collision. Now it seems as though that computing power has been harnessed by the team who have named the collision issue “SHAttered”.
Cryptographic hash functions such as SHA-1 are used extensively in applications of data integrity and data storage. Some applications rely on a cryptographic hash function being collision-resistant, others that it is not possible to generate the input from only knowing the hash.
Article Link: https://blogs.forcepoint.com/security-labs/shattered-sha-1-hash-collision