According to the Daily Telegraph, every fine levied by red-light cameras in New Zealand could be at risk due to an embedded md5 that is kept along with the image to verify its authenticity. Because a collision in MD5 can be arbitrarily generated, you cannot be sure that the image you see is the orginal speeding camera image, and don’t know that the government hasn’t conspired to give you a speeding ticket. However, the article seems to neglect to mention that there is (and probably cannot be) a way to generate a meaningful hash collision, where the new-image that produces the same hash actually has some visual meaning pertinent to the case.

In other words, because you could change the image while preserving the md5, the evidence is not admissable in court. Even if your new generated image was complete garbage…

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