I don't need to prove that I can do a thing to prove that a thing is possible and the burden of proof is on you claiming that this isn't an active security problem because that's basically well known and well understood. The only outstanding questions is how-detectable, impactful, and available those attacks are.

Specifically the things you need to counter is at least one of the thing in the following list:

* Hash security: SHA1 collisions are feasible to generate and companies are actively moving away from them with good reason and have been doing so for at least seven years (https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha..., https://www.howtogeek.com/238705/what-is-sha-1-and-why-will-...)

* Content generation: As I've already discussed, the contents of what you use to make that collision can be anything you want and meet any requirements you have the ability to produce a generator for. To meet this you're going to have to prove to me that no engineer can make a seeded random number that uses a language's grammar to produce plausible and valid to compile token, or to just use a language model to produce plausible code and comments (also requiring a seed). This is a _trivial_ thing to do.

* The attack: Git relies on a chain-of-hashes based on SHA1, those hashes are over the complete files included in the repository if you can generate a collision for a file in git's history you can replace the files in that commit and all subsequent commits will remain valid. This is the attack everyone is worried about related to git. The only thing that protects against this right now is the security of SHA1. Additionally signatures on commits and tags DO NOT protect against this, they're over the hash, commit message, and list of objects not the objects themselves. The attacked files will still look like they came from a valid signed commit.

The extra scary part of that attack is the malicious/changed file will not be visible to any existing checkouts, those clients will believe they have the correct object and will continue to show that correct object. But anything that does regular fresh checkouts, like say a CI system that deploys to prod, will get the poisoned object. Even if its checking the signatures on every commit, it won't see this coming.

So the security of all our git repos, our production environments, new devs are foundationally rooted in the security of either write access to the repository OR the foundational security of SHA1.

I would say that is a practical and useful attack. A faster hashing algorithm will EXACERBATE this problem as you're almost always trading collision resistance for speed. Any hashing algorithm that allows you to calculate its hashes faster is MORE vulnerable to collision attacks not less.

"Computationally astronomical" isn't a very good argument. 20 years ago SHA1 was insane in its security. These thing get weaker over time and need to be periodically replaced, not because they're failing, but because increased resource capacity has fundamentally changed the original assumptions the algorithm was designed for.

Even with the computationally astronomical argument that is a matter of cost and resources, not practicality. It absolutely is practical to do if the result is worth the outcome. What is the most famous git based project? Maybe the thing it was originally designed to manage... Think maybe _any_ nation state would be happy to pay less than ~$100k USD (https://sha-mbles.github.io/) to get some malicious code running in production builds of the Linux kernel? The kernel project specifically has extra manual checks and multiple "known good repos" with commits literally being added by hand to protect against this attack. It's practical, it's a problem. It needs to be fixed.

If you still insist on a working example pay me $125k and I'll produce one for you.