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Posted by Lee Marsh on 05/28/05 10:47
This isn't really 'undoing' an md5 hashing, but there is this
http://md5.rednoize.com/ database of known md5 keys that you can search
through. Hey, at least the probability of finding your key there is better
than finding it by decrypting it; as Oil Filth has pointed out, the
probability with decrypting is astronomical.
--
<=============>
--Lee
http://www.inaneasylum.org
Goodbye, adios, bis bald, see ya later, wiedersehen, and everything in
between
"Oli Filth" <catch@olifilth.co.uk> wrote in message
news:dMMle.1831$i61.243@newsfe5-gui.ntli.net...
> simon said the following on 27/05/2005 21:01:
>>>Start with a given string, it will always map to the same hash. Start
>>>with the hash, it could map to any one of an infinite number of strings.
>>
>> I don't quite agree. But that's not the point.
>> I was only replying to the OP. So for the third time, it is technically
>> possible to get the string but almost impossible to do so.
>
> No, it isn't possible! (I know that's not the point, but since I'm
> bored...)
>
> Think about it, md5() produces a 32-character hexadecimal result, i.e.
> 16^32 possible results. This means that it can only uniquely identify a
> set of 16^32 different input strings. Clearly, there are far more possible
> strings than that (an infinite number, in fact), hence it's impossible to
> get back the original string on this basis alone.
>
>
> An analogy:
>
> Take a page of text as a string, and create an "encoded" version by taking
> every 3rd letter and concatenating them to a new string.
>
> Clearly, it's very unlikely that I'd get the same encoded string if I come
> along with a different page of text and did this. However, that doesn't
> mean that you have any chance of identifying the original string given the
> encoded string. There has been a fundamental loss of information, which is
> impossible to retrieve unless you already know something about the
> original string.
>
>
> --
> Oli
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