Encryption experts warned for at least five years SHA-1 could no longer be considered secure so what's noteworthy about Roth's project is not what he did or the approach he used, which was essentially based on trying every possible combination until he found a hit, but the technology he used.
What used to be the stuff of distributed computing projects with worldwide participants that took many months to bear fruit can now be done by a lone individuals in minutes and using rentable resources that cost the same price as a morning coffee to carry out the trick. Roth's proof-of-concept exercise cost just $2. This was the amount needed to hire a bank of powerful graphics processing units to carry out the required number-crunching using the Cuda-Multiforcer.
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