nanog mailing list archives
Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P
From: Scott A Crosby <scrosby () cs rice edu>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:41:23 -0500
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:33:21 -0700 (PDT), Gregory Hicks <ghicks () cadence com> writes:
I recall even seeing posts about people claiming this meant original data being reconstructed from the checksum! That would be truly amazing since I could reconstruct a 680MB ISO from just 61d38fad42b4037970338636b5e72e5a. Wow!
Assuming that MD5 is a PRF, about 2^{-128} files will have such a hash value. For a file 680MB in size, About 2^{680*1024*1024*8-128} in total. If I had a list of all of those files, it would be impossible for me to identify which of them was the 'right' image. First-preimage resistance means that it should be computationally infeasible for anyone to create *any* file with that particular hash. It was also believed to be computationally infeasible to find *any* two files that had the same MD5 hash. The attack on MD5 showed that it in fact is computationally feasible to find two files with the same MD5 --- someone did it. This attack showed that MD5 no longer meets some of its design requirements.
The "collision" problem discovered means that there might be MULTIPLE 680MB files that give the same checksum.
Scott
Current thread:
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Gregory Hicks (Aug 30)
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Crist Clark (Aug 30)
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Scott A Crosby (Aug 30)
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Majdi Abbas (Aug 30)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Simon Waters (Aug 31)
- Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Erik Parker (Aug 31)
- RE: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P Dave Hilton (Aug 31)