Dealing with SHA-256 Collisions

A mathematician friend of mine pointed out that there are very few if any hash protocols that have survived for 10 years or more. What would Bitcoin’s solution be if SHA256 were to be cracked tomorrow?

I don’t think that broken cryptography could ever be the end of BitCoin if it becomes popular. Since the block chain can be forked without losing too much data, modifications to all aspects of BitCoin are possible. If SHA-256 was broken, a new version of BitCoin would be released that would switch to a stronger hash function for addresses. Changing the hash function used for blocks might not be necessary if the weakness still required some non-trivial amount of computation. The new version would ignore SHA-256 blocks after a certain point in time, but most old transactions would survive.

In case the weakening of SHA-256 is gradual instead of sudden (much more likely, IMO), BitCoin could stretch the process of switching to a different hash algorithm over a long time. First accept SHA-512 (or whatever) in addition to SHA-256, then use SHA-512 by default, and finally stop accepting SHA-256 for new blocks.

In case the weakening of SHA-256 is gradual instead of sudden (much more likely, IMO), BitCoin could stretch the process of switching to a different hash algorithm over a long time. First accept SHA-512 (or whatever) in addition to SHA-256, then use SHA-512 by default, and finally stop accepting SHA-256 for new blocks.

Wouldn’t the users lose their coins?

So it’s possible to switch “on the fly” to a new hash function? Wouldn’t all the old transactions then be compromised (because they could be trivially recomputed)?

SHA-256 has already been weakened by a factor of 16 (according to my friend. I can’t find documentation on that, but I trust him). That’s 16 out of 2^256, so not a huge deal, but still.

After thinking about this some more, I’ve realized that breaking the hash function used in blocks would be more disastrous than I had originally thought. But it should still be possible to change the hash function “on-the-fly” by including secure hashes of each real block in the old chain with the new BitCoin release. Some mechanism of doing this (hopefully more elegant) would also have to be used for a gradual hash change.

Everyone’s balance is publicly available, so it should always be possible to preserve this data, no matter what changes are made to BitCoin.

SHA-256 is very strong. It’s not like the incremental step from MD5 to SHA1. It can last several decades unless there’s some massive breakthrough.

If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.

If the hash breakdown came gradually, we could transition to a new hash in an orderly way. The software would be programmed to start using a new hash after a certain block number. Everyone would have to upgrade by that time. The software could save the new hash of all old blocks to make sure a different block with the same old hash can’t be used.

SHA-256 is very strong.  It’s not like the incremental step from MD5 to SHA1.  It can last several decades unless there’s some massive breakthrough attack.

If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.

If the hash breakdown came gradually, we could transition to a new hash in an orderly way.  The software would be programmed to start using a new hash after a certain block number.  Everyone would have to upgrade by that time.  The software could save the new hash of all the old blocks to make sure a different block with the same old hash can’t be used.

A mathematician friend of mine pointed out that there are very few if any hash protocols that have survived for 10 years or more. What would Bitcoin’s solution be if SHA256 were to be cracked tomorrow?

SHA-1 lasted over ten years before being significantly weakened. Now, even 15 years in, full SHA-1 still has no known collisions. RIPEMD-160 has also held up for over ten years, as has GOST, Tiger, and probably others.

As I understood it the Hash algorithms that are used are completely replacable, and should the demise of SHA-256 become apparent we could switch to another Hashing algorithm, starting a new chain, and users would buy that new currency with their old coins, creating an inflation of the old coins and creating request for the new version, just like creating new services that rely on BC does now.

I don’t think moving to a new version would be hard 😁

As I understood it the Hash algorithms that are used are completely replacable, and should the demise of SHA-256 become apparent we could switch to another Hashing algorithm, starting a new chain, and users would buy that new currency with their old coins, creating an inflation of the old coins and creating request for the new version, just like creating new services that rely on BC does now.

I don’t think moving to a new version would be hard

or you just grandfather the current blockchain to be accepted against their SHA256 hashes but also reject any new valid SHA256 hashes.

If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.

So would the world stop all transactions while a patch is developed and put into place, then once that’s done, ask everyone to recreate their transactions from the point of discovery onwards? Let’s say it’s a large organisation and they put through 10,000 transactions an hour - that could be a lot of work to redo.

If the hash breakdown came gradually, we could transition to a new hash in an orderly way. The software would be programmed to start using a new hash after a certain block number. Everyone would have to upgrade by that time. The software could save the new hash of all the old blocks to make sure a different block with the same old hash can’t be used.

Let’s hope quantum computing theory doesn’t become reality then.