An attempt to backdoor the kernel

Posted Nov 13, 2003 9:59 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: An attempt to backdoor the kernel by Stephen_Beynon
Parent article: An attempt to backdoor the kernel

Sure. More spesifically, the magnitude of the problem is proportiaonal to the square root of
the other problem. So finding two strings with the same 160 bit hash requires you to
generate and hash on the order of 2^80 strings. I wouldn't loose much sleep over this, but if
you do, there's no problem with going to a bigger hash.

If you could generate and hash 2^30 strings a second (and store all the hashes you already
have created...) you'd still need 2^50 seconds before you'd on the average get lucky.
Everyone designing cryptographic hashes is aware of this issue, which is why the hashes
are so big in the first place.