On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Orna Agmon wrote: > On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > BTW, how does GnuPG know how to generate a unique key ID? I thought the > > server assigned it a key ID out of its key pool. Surely, if any GPG > > program generates key IDs independetly there will be some collision > > between two specific keys? > > The KEY ID cannot be unique. It can be well distributed, such thatkeys > that vary a little have a very different KEY ID, but since it holds a lot > less information than the actual key, there is no way of it being uniqe. > Bird house principle (? - SHOVACH YONIM). >
Actually, I think the birthday paradox is more appropriate. In order for the bird house principle to take effect, there must be at least 2**32+1 keys in the world, which I'm not sure if this is the case now. OTOH, according to the birthday paradox, it is enough to be around the square root of this figure (2**16 == 65536) to have a probability greater than half for any two identical key IDs to be present. For more information about the birthday paradox consult: http://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/birthday.html Regards, Shlomi Fish > Orna. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ There's no point in keeping an idea to yourself since there's a 10 to 1 chance that somebody already has it and will share it before you. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
