On Jul 20, 2012, at 12:16 PM, Michel Segel wrote: > I don't believe that there has been any reports of collisions, but if. You > are concerned you could use the SHA-1 for generating the hash. Relatively > speaking, SHA-1is slower, but still fast enough for most applications.
Every hash function can have collisions, by definition. If the correctness of your design depends on collisions being impossible, rather than very rare, then your design is faulty. Cryptographic hash functions have the property that it is computationally hard to create inputs that match a given output. That doesn’t in itself make cryptographic hash functions better than other hash functions for avoiding hot-spotting. (But it does usually make cryptographic hash functions more expensive to compute than other hash functions.) You may want to look at <http://www.strchr.com/hash_functions> and <http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/49550/which-hashing-algorithm-is-best-for-uniqueness-and-speed/145633#145633>. Hope this helps, joe
