My cryptographically-inclined friend suggested we use a universal hash
function or something a bit stronger, such as VHASH.

These functions take a "key", which we could choose at random and fix
in the code.

VHASH outputs 64-bit digests with collision probability 2^61, so in
expectation you'd need to hash 2^30 files before you saw a collision.
If that wasn't good enough, we could compute two VHASH digests with
different keys and concatenate them.

-Justin

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Martin Pool <m...@sourcefrog.net> wrote:
> On 20 October 2010 08:15, Joel Rosdahl <j...@rosdahl.net> wrote:
>> MD4 has been there from the start and neither Tridge or I have seen any
>> reason to switch it. MD5, SHA1 and other even more modern cryptograhic
>> hash functions are indeed stronger but also slower, and the increased
>> resistance against various crypto attacks doesn't seem necessary in a
>> tool like ccache. That said, I'm sure there nowadays may exist hash
>> functions that are both better (i.e., with lower collision rate) AND
>> faster than MD4. Do you (or anyone else) know of any with properties
>> that would be a good fit for ccache?
>
> I think any of the cryptographic hash functions will have an even
> distribution of outputs, so nothing else will give stronger resistance
> to accidental collision.  The only problem with MD4 is that it might
> be vulnerable to malicious collisions (which seems pointless in ccache
> as it currently exists) and that others might be faster.
>
> --
> Martin
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