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Posted by Oliver Grδtz on 12/03/07 12:11
Jerry Stuckle schrieb:
> And I still stand by my statement. They are not valid for finding an
> original string. Even a string of 5 characters may have a duplicate
> hash. And the longer you get, the more likely you are to have a
> duplicate. Or a password of 'ksfjlksahoh3ndskjvcn' just might have the
> same hash as 'abc', for instance.
No it might not, MD5 is not THAT unstable. You need 2.6 x 10^18 input
messages to achieve a collision probability of 1%. The collision
probability for *two* *short* inputs (that's BOTH of them being SHORT)
is EXTREMELY (no, really !) low. And, to use your example, I guess Ziggy
will recall if "ksfjlksahoh3ndskjvcn" or "abc" was his password or - if
he tried to recover the password for someone else, then that person will
be able to tell them apart. The other way round, if someone wants to
find an input to reproduce a certain hash in order to get into a system
where only the encoded password is known and cannot be changed, then ANY
of the inputs will work so IT DOESN'T MATTER if he gets "abc" or
"ksfjlksahoh3ndskjvcn" as an answer.
OLLi
--
Hoshi: "Shouldn't we try to help them?"
T'Pol: "They don't want our help."
Hoshi: "How do you know?"
T'Pol: "They're Klingons."
[Enterprise]
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