Has SHA-256 been broken?
treadwell-stanton.com
treadwell-stanton.com
1) The copy is not great, and is not of the standard you would expect from a supposedly American company: "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."
2) The phone number listed is 917, which usually (not always) is for mobile phones in NYC. (Which finance firm can't afford a nice 212/800 central number from Verizon?)
3) Their About Us page doesn't actually list any real names of executives and directors: https://www.treadwell-stanton.com/about-us
4) Their email is hosted by Godaddy:
host -t mx treadwell-stanton.com treadwell-stanton.com mail is handled by 10 mailstore1.europe.secureserver.net. treadwell-stanton.com mail is handled by 0 smtp.europe.secureserver.net.
FINRA, SEC, etc would probably not be pleased with Godaddy email.
The name of the "firm" reminds me of Stratton Oakmont.
Probability that they broke SHA-256 - 0%. 0.00000%.
Their "address," 30 Wall Street, is for a virtual office business center, Capstone Executive Offices. https://liquidspace.com/US/NY/new-york/your-wall-street-offi...
In any case, this announcement seems to be a vaporware pump-and-dump scheme for a bitcoin accelerator: https://www.facebook.com/TreadwellStanton
The timing of their first Facebook post is within 6 months of when they supposedly broke SHA256, so that definitely says long con.
That is a much lower standard than a preimage (and trivial if you do have the computational ability to preimage), and was sufficient to declare SHA1 broken (SHAttered is a public collision, AFAIK there still is no preimage against a "full strength" SHA1).
> The announcement aims to secure financial and technological platform superiority to its clients and investors worldwide.