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Claim that SHA-256 Has Been Broken

Accepted submission by Arthur T Knackerbracket at 2019-09-10 17:34:30
Security

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [treadwell-stanton.com]:

The Wall Street fintech Treadwell Stanton DuPont broke silence today as it announced its Research & Development and Science Teams successfully broke the SHA-256 hashing algorithm silently in controlled laboratory conditions over a year ago. The announcement aims to secure financial and technological platform superiority to its clients and investors worldwide.

"The era of decentralized, inflation-free digital currency is upon us," said CEO Mike Wallace. "These breakthrough advances in cryptanalytic research, amidst widespread economic recession fears, create incredible financial opportunities, but also come with huge responsibility to ensure the technology we build is secure and benefits everyone."

SHA-256, which stands for Secure Hash Algorithm – 256bit, is a one-way function that converts a text of any length into a string of 256 bits, known as a hashing function. SHA-256 is a member of the SHA-2 cryptographic hash functions designed by the NSA, with all major SSL certificate issuers using it to enable encrypted communication between a web browser and a web server, which is by all current standards deemed secure and trustworthy. Up to now, it was thought impossible to use the output of the hash function to reconstruct its given input. However, this now seems to have changed, although Treadwell Stanton DuPont's cryptanalysis does not work exactly this way. It should also be remembered that Bitcoin makes heavy use of the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function too, and so it is not very clear what impact the recently announced discovery may have on the cryptocurrency.

While the best public cryptanalysis has tried to break the hashing function since its inception in 2001, work on searching, developing and testing practical collision and pre-image vulnerabilities on the SHA-256 hashing algorithm began back in 2016 in Treadwell Stanton DuPont's R&D facilities, culminating 2 years later with the successful discovery of a structural weakness and the initial development of the first practical solution space of real world value by its researchers.

"While we have successfully broken all 64 rounds of pre-image resistance," said Seiijiro Takamoto, Treadwell Stanton DuPont's director of newly formed Hardware Engineering Division, "it is not our intention to bring down Bitcoin, break SSL/TLS security or crack any financial sector security whatsoever."

In accordance with its disclosure policy, Treadwell Stanton DuPont won't be saying exactly how they did it — because once the proof-of-concept is out, anyone with enough computing power will be able to produce a SHA-256 collision, rendering the algorithm both insecure and obsolete. Cryptographers have long been predicting a collision like this would require at least 100 years before someone produced a smart enough algorithm which actually finds and exploits a structural weakness, given the mathematical laws that govern hash functions. And while it is inevitable that hash collisions should occur because the input data is potentially infinite but the output length is fixed, this prediction has been rendered very short. For a while back we’ve all known to some extent something like this would be possible and was bound to happen, albeit not so fast.

Treadwell Stanton DuPont revolutionized stock market forecasting technology with the introduction of the NeuroEvolution Based Unified Layer Architecture (NEBULA) Synaptic Synthesis Engine (SSE) online platform in 2017. Today, Treadwell Stanton DuPont leads the world in innovation with the use of quantum-inspired combinatorial optimization computing techniques, empowering investors with breakthrough stock market forecasting services.

 

Treadwell Stanton DuPont now joins the Wall Street cryptocurrency bandwagon and will start accepting bitcoin immediately as a manual form of payment for its highly sought-after stock and securities forecast charts, along with the monthly subscription needed to adquire those charts and build a portfolio.

Especially for large payment amounts, which have historically taken extra time to clear, crypto transactions are nearly instantaneous. The company is fully backing clients with no interest in using Paypal or who reside in Paypal-blacklisted countries by offering to quickly negotiate up to a full 5% lower exchange rate than average major bitcoin exchanges worldwide. This is definitely great news to many eager investors who already deal in cryptocurrency.

Treadwell Stanton DuPont is the first ever and only fintech company to bring viable securities and stock forecasting to a select group of clients worldwide. Its business strategy is centered on its pioneering and revolutionary 4D Vectorial Hypercube NEBULA4 and NEBULA2 Synaptic Synthesis Engine processes, which makes possible weekly stock predictions with an exacting, unprecedented level of precision.

 

Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer is a new technology that is used to solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems instantly. Digital Annealer uses a digital circuit design inspired by quantum phenomena and can solve problems which are difficult and time consuming for classical computers. And while Treadwell Stanton DuPont is already using their own ground-breaking neural network technology based on custom Lenovo 6-PetaFLOP supercomputing nodes, there’s always room for improvement.

The Wall Street fintech is busy working on harnessing Fujitsu’s DAU combinatorial performance, combining a number of 1QBit software solutions with their own revolutionary 4D Vectorial Hypercube-based NEBULA6 Synaptic Synthesis Engine, which already provides impressive stock market predicting abilities. DAU will push the company’s SSE’s spectacular performance one notch higher.

This move precedes the company’s plan to bring IBM’s new Q System One 20-qubit quantum computer into the NEBULA6 mix and become fully operational by the end of the year.

Treadwell Stanton DuPont is the first ever and only fintech company to bring viable securities and stock forecasting to a select group of clients worldwide. Its business strategy is centered on its pioneering and revolutionary 4D Vectorial Hypercube NEBULA4 and NEBULA2 Synaptic Synthesis Engine processes, which makes possible weekly stock predictions with an exacting, unprecedented level of precision.


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