This news is a couple weeks old, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Several years ago I mentioned a flaw in MD5. Seeking a proof of concept, a team of researchers successfully forged a CA certificate that could sign any certificate they desired. The resulting certificate would be implicitly trusted by all major web browsers. The team presented their results at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress last month in Berlin.
I wanted to briefly describe their ingenious technique but gave up after realizing how many prerequisite concepts I'd need to introduce. Read their excellent paper if you're interested in the details. The team used a farm of PlayStation 3 consoles to compute a CA certificate that collided with a carefully crafted certificate issued by RapidSSL.
There's no immediate risk to users. This development is primarily a wakeup call to certificate authorities to stop relying on MD5 immediately. MD5 is broken.
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