>Jason did not say that a secure hash function is incapable of
>producing a single collision.  He said that we will never *see* a
>collision if the hash function is truly secure.

that's correct.  for instance, based on recent findings, SHA1 is not "truly
secure" because it now takes a mere 1.8 trillion years of CPU time to
produce a collision instead of the normal 3.8 quadrillion years of CPU time.
(do the math, assume 10K ops/sec)

sorry, couldn't resist. :-p

Josh Coates
http://www.jcoates.org

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Halcrow
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 1:11 PM
To: BYU Unix Users Group
Subject: Re: [uug] SHA-1 is probably broken


On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 01:04:51PM -0700, Harshwardhan Nagaonkar wrote:
> Jason Holt wrote:
> >On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Josh Coates wrote:
> <snip/>
> >bunch of other hashes, that was big news.  A bunch of people said
> >"hey, it's just a collision, we already knew hash functions have
> >collisions," but they didn't realize that in a truly secure hash
> >function, *we'll never ever see even a single one*.  And sure
> >enough, people like Kaminsky are showing that
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> <snip/>
>
> The only formal training I've had in hashes and hash buckets was in
> CS235, so this might not be a good question, considering my limited
> know-how.
>
> But I was wondering how you could have a hash function that never
> has a single collision?

Jason did not say that a secure hash function is incapable of
producing a single collision.  He said that we will never *see* a
collision if the hash function is truly secure.

Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
                         Michael A. Halcrow
       Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center
GnuPG Fingerprint: 05B5 08A8 713A 64C1 D35D  2371 2D3C FDDA 3EB6 601D

"The Computer made me do it."


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