Dear Barry, b> Of course it's possible. All hashes, by their very nature, have b> collisions. The only way to have a truly unique identifier is to use b> the actual content of the file (or chunk) itself. The minute you b> distill the content down to a hash, you're guaranteeing that collisions b> will occur.
You are correct of course, the possibility is there. I was refering to the fact that it is possible in another post of mine, however the possibility of collisions happening "naturaly" is "not very likely" to say at least. I still need to hear about anybody who found a non fabricated md5 collision in the wild..on files. b> somewhat rare. :) Warm food at MC Donalds is "somewhat rare". Natural occuring md5 (or coll. in sophisticated hash functions in general) are VERY rare not to say virtualy impossible. AFAIK <- b> Regarding corrupt files via P2P protocols... no file transfered via P2P b> has _ever_ tranferred bad data and wound up corrupt, right? :) b> /friendly sarcasm. Hehe, got that one :) -- Thierry Zoller _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
