But the design of SHA1 looks pretty similar to SHA256[1]... And BLAKE[2].. and many other unbroken hash functions.
They nearly all have the idea of doing a bunch of simple bit-mixing operations (for example. shuffle the bits and xor) a lot of times so it becomes infeasible to reason about how to manipulate the input to get a given output.
The most recent and powerful collision attack on SHA1 is essentially a form of differential cryptanalysis, made feasible by SHA1's linear key schedule. SHA2 has a totally different key schedule that doesn't admit the same attack.
Blake2 looks like SHA2 in the sense that all cryptographic hash functions look kind of similar, but they're unrelated:
* the BLAKE hashes are derived from ChaCha20
* they're HAIFA hashes rather than Merkle-Damgard (you can sort of think of MD hashes as "previous generation" hashes, and anything after that as "current generation") --- MD hashes work sort of the way you'd think CBC-MAC works (just chaining and throwing out the results), and HAIFA keeps state between rounds.
* MD4, MD5, SHA1, and SHA2 are straight Davies Meyer constructions --- the compression function (1) encrypts the chaining value (2) with the current message block as the key and (3) XORs the result against the chaining value --- and BLAKE isn't.
Aumasson has posted, I think a couple times, a prediction that collisions in SHA2 simply won't ever be found; that's based on an assessment that there is essentially nothing on the horizon that threatens it. The reasons not to use SHA2 are performance (though: SHA2 has excellent perf on current hardware) and avoiding length extension attacks (ie, forgetting to use HMAC instead of keyed hashes, which nobody does).
They nearly all have the idea of doing a bunch of simple bit-mixing operations (for example. shuffle the bits and xor) a lot of times so it becomes infeasible to reason about how to manipulate the input to get a given output.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/SH...
[2]: https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/cd2e43a515c8a65a58c87e...