On Tuesday, 15 ׳‘November 2005 18:14, Baruch Even wrote:
> Omer Zak wrote:
> > THE QUESTION:
> > According to the above git README, objects in git are named by
> > their SHA1 hashes. So, what happens if two objects have the same
> > SHA1 hash, unlikely as it might be?
>
> The world ends.
> I haven't checked for a long time now but I don't think there is any
> safeguard for such a case.
Actually, AFAIK, there is such a safe guard - The Laws of Mathematics.
Which clearly describe the mind boggling improbability of such a case. A
simple (and completely inaccurate) example would go something like
this: Suppose for a second that a million kernel hackers would labour
day and night to produce one random file each, every second. Such a
horde would take over 4 decillion years (million billion billion
billion years) to produce such a collision.
(*) I know there was some talk about colliding SHA1 ("breaking" it), but
at best that would reduce the key size to be collided to 80 bit (IIRC)
which is still huge and in any way it only makes sense for very short
data chunks - no where near the complexity of a run of the mill kernel
source file.
--
Oded
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