Understanding sha-1 collision weakness

Question

According to various sources, attacks looking for sha-1 collisions have been improved to 2^52 operations:

http://www.secureworks.com/research/blog/index.php/2009/6/3

Answer 1

The result announced in your link is an attack, a sequence of careful, algorithmically-chosen steps that generate collisions with greater probability than would a random attack. It is not a weakness in the hash function's distribution. Well, ok, it is, but not of the sort that makes a random attack likely on the order of 2^52 to succeed.

If no one is trying to generate collisions in your hash outputs, this result does not affect you.