shattered.io is the home of SHAttered, the research that produced the first practical, public collision for the SHA-1 hash function. On 23 February 2017, a team from Google Research and the Cryptology Group at CWI Amsterdam released two different PDF files that share a single SHA-1 digest, ending a long debate about whether the algorithm was still safe to trust. The paper and the two colliding PDFs still live here, and you can download them and check the hashes yourself.
That heritage shapes everything we publish. We started as the place that turned an abstract weakness into something you could hold in your hands, and we still believe the best way to understand security is to see it work and then see it fail.
What this site is now
Today shattered.io is an independent editorial hub that explains cryptography, security, privacy, cryptocurrency, and the technology behind provably-fair systems. We cover how hash functions work, why certain designs age out of trust, how modern protocols protect data, and how the same hashing primitives that secure a signature also let an online game prove it did not cheat.
We are an informational publication. We are not an operator, not a betting platform, and not a gambling site of any kind. When we write about provably-fair gaming or crypto casinos, we are explaining the mechanisms, the math, and the claims so you can judge them for yourself.
How we research and explain topics
Every explainer starts from primary sources. For standards and algorithms that means the published specifications from NIST, peer-reviewed work indexed by the IACR, and the original papers behind a given result rather than second-hand summaries of them. Where a claim can be tested, we test it. The SHAttered PDFs on this site are a small example: run sha1sum on each and watch two visibly different documents return the same 40-character fingerprint.
For technical mechanisms such as provably-fair verification, we walk through the actual commitment scheme, reproduce the checks where we can, and describe the limits as plainly as the strengths. We write in clear language because cryptography is hard enough without jargon stacked on top of it. We would rather a reader leave with one idea they fully understand than five they half-remember.
Independence matters to us. Our explanations are not shaped by operators or sponsors, and when something is uncertain or contested we say so instead of papering over it.
Who writes here
shattered.io is produced by a team of writers and reviewers working across cryptography, security engineering, privacy, blockchain, and iGaming. That mix is deliberate. The person explaining a 160-bit collision and the person explaining how a crypto casino’s seed-and-nonce verification works are drawing on the same foundations, and pairing those perspectives keeps the technical detail honest and the practical context grounded.
Contributors bring hands-on experience with the systems they cover, and drafts are reviewed against primary documentation before they go live. When we get something wrong, we correct it and note the change.
A note on what this content is for
Everything here is educational. Articles about cryptocurrency, provably-fair systems, or online gaming are written to explain how the technology works, not to push you toward any product, platform, or wager. Nothing on this site is financial advice, investment advice, or betting advice, and none of it should be read as a recommendation to gamble. Gambling carries real financial risk, laws differ by jurisdiction, and any decision to use a platform is yours alone. If gambling is causing harm, please reach out to a local support service.
We built our reputation on showing the truth of a thing rather than asserting it, and that is still the standard we hold ourselves to. If you spot an error, have a question, or want to suggest a topic, write to us at [email protected].
