> > IMHO It would take a _very_ clever scam to produce an md5sum that looked > > similar enough to fool a casual glance. > > It is not so much YHO, but more the mathematical properties of this > kind of hash sums :-)
It's a hash, and you can see easily that any number of bytes of input are transformed into 32 bytes of output. From this one can conclude that there have to be different files (of possibly vastly different size?) which transform into the same hash value. Think "number" space. The property that only a small change of input results in a large change of output makes it interesting for checksumming, because it reduces the probability that 2 similar bit errors in the data cancel each other out, i.e. produce the same hash. That's what I understand anyway. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
