Sad for the White House: A strange girl in China cracked the US government password.

Sad for the White House: A strange girl in China cracked the US government password.

There is a beautiful decoding expert Huang in the TV series Assassination. She used her genius mind to solve the most difficult password. Is there really such a female decoder in reality? Yes, Wang Xiaoyun, a double-hired professor from Tsinghua University and Shandong University, is such a female expert in mathematics. Recently, 40-year-old Wang Xiaoyun won the "China Young Female Scientist Award" for her outstanding contribution in the field of cryptanalysis.

She cracked the password used by the US government.

The MD5 encryption algorithm, even the fastest supercomputer, will take more than 1 10,000 years to crack. But Dr. Wang Xiaoyun, who graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Shandong University, and her research team can find effective results in a few minutes with ordinary personal computers.

SHA- 1 cryptographic algorithm, designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency, was recommended to the US government and financial system as early as 1994, and it is the most widely used cryptographic algorithm in the US government at present. In early 2005, Wang Xiaoyun and her research team announced that they had successfully cracked SHA- 1.

"collapse! The crisis of cryptography, the American magazine New Scientist summed up Wang Xiaoyun's landmark achievements with such a shocking title. Due to the appearance of Wang Xiaoyun, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that the US government will no longer use SHA- 1 in five years, and replace it with a more advanced new algorithm. Microsoft, Sun, Atmel and other well-known companies have also published their own countermeasures.

"She has the instinct to crack the code."

Two years ago, Wang Xiaoyun announced at the International Cryptography Conference held in Santa Barbara, California, USA that she and her research team had successfully cracked the four internationally famous cryptographic algorithms MD5, HAVAL- 128, MD4 and RIPEMD. When she announced the third grade, applause had already sounded at the meeting. For this day, Wang Xiaoyun has been working silently for 10 years. A few months later, she deciphered the more difficult SHA- 1.

Wang Xiaoyun is engaged in the research of hash function. At present, MD5 and SHA- 1, the two most widely used cryptographic algorithms in the world, are the most important hash functions. At present, these two algorithms are the key technologies in international electronic signature and many other cryptographic applications, which are widely used in e-commerce fields such as finance and securities. SHA- 1 is regarded as the unshakable cornerstone of modern network security.

At the beginning of Wang Xiaoyun's research on hash function, although some cryptographers tried to decipher it, there was no breakthrough. Therefore, the study of hash function has become the most hopeless field for many cryptographers in the past five years. But Wang Xiaoyun didn't believe it. She wants to know, is the hash function really as unbreakable as it looks?

Wang Xiaoyun cracked the password in different ways. Although password analysis can't be separated from the computer now, for Wang Xiaoyun, the computer is only an auxiliary means to crack the password himself. More often, she calculates by hand and designs the cracking method by hand.

Yao Qizhi, a Turing Prize winner, commented on her: "She has an intuition that she can pick out the best path from thousands of possibilities."

"I went out for a meal after cracking the password."

When Wang Xiaoyun led her team to end MD5, The Washington Times reported that the new decoding technology developed by China decoding experts could "attack the White House". Wang Xiaoyun said that in the public's understanding, cryptographers are like hackers, but our work is obviously different from hackers. She said: "It is malicious for hackers to crack passwords, hoping to gain benefits by stealing information protected by password algorithms. The job of cryptanalysis scientists is to evaluate the security of a cryptographic algorithm and find a more secure cryptographic algorithm. Unlike the secret attacks of hackers, cryptographers all over the world work on an open platform. The functional method of cryptographic algorithm design and the theory of cryptographic analysis are all open. "

She said: "I went out for a meal the day I cracked SHA- 1. I am a little excited because I am the first person to know world-class secrets. "

Wang Xiaoyun said that in general, it takes about 10 years to crack an advanced password, while it takes about 8 years to design a new password. Cryptography is developed in this constant creation and cracking. From now on, the world cryptology circle has begun to design new passwords, and it is predicted that a new generation of secure passwords will be generated by 20 12.

Wang Xiaoyun said, "99% of scientists in this field will never succeed. Now it seems that the choice of this research field was very risky and may never achieve substantive results. But I am interested in this issue. "

Ten years to crack the password is the easiest.

10, many people will think that this scientist's life must be very monotonous. Wang Xiaoyun said: "That 10 year is 10 year that I feel very relaxed." While cracking the password, she gave birth to a daughter and raised a balcony full of flowers. The only habit related to numbers in her life turned out to be remembering taxi numbers.

As it turns out, more than half of the members of Wang Xiaoyun's research group are female doctoral students. I work late and there is no bus, so Wang Xiaoyun always takes a taxi to take them home. In order to ensure safety, she always remembers the taxi numbers of her classmates. Only when her classmates go home and send her a safe message can she delete the taxi numbers from her mind.