Wednesday February 23, 2005

Hash cracking and storage Announcement of SHA-1 crypto hash cracking here.
Bruce Schneier has a nice dialogue on hash cracking here.

Ancient chinese proverb: "It's not about the algorithm, it's about how you use it."

Storage vendors are continuing to discount market concerns about hash collisions by saying "the odds of hash collision are infinitesmal". Well, I know a customer with 2B objects in storage. Is 1/2,000,000,000 small enough? Yeah I know, 1/(2^80) or something of that form is the statistical answer. The point is that storage systems have to do better. If there is a non-zero probability of hash collision, then the system must accept and welcome hash collisions!

Hashes cannot be used in exclusivity to validate uniqueness of a data object.