Some exciting and disturbing news surfaced this week. Computer Scientists from France and China have uncovered flaws in the MD5 and SHA-0 hashing algorithms. Though still preliminary, these findings suggest that an attacker could produce a hash collision in a short timeframe on a household PC. The security implications are quite serious. Apache, for example, signs its releases on mirror sites with MD5 checksums. An attacker could, in theory, incorporate malicious code in such a way that the compromised Apache distribution would yield the same MD5 signature.
The discovery of a similar flaw in SHA-1, which is widely used in PGP and SSL, may have been announced last Tuesday at Crypto 2004 in Santa Barbara. I could not find any related articles, however.
I knew it. I'm going to go invent my own algorithm, thank you very much.