MD5 collisions and the impact on computer forensics

In August 2004 at the annual cryptography conference in Santa Barbara, California a group of cryptographers, Xianyan Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, Hongbo Yu, made the announcement that they had successfully generated two files with different contents that had the same MD5 hash. This paper reviews the announcement and discusses the impact this discovery may have on the use of MD5 hash functions for evidence authentication in the field of computer forensics.