26 Apr
2007
26 Apr
'07
7:40 a.m.
> By definition, if you can do better than brute
force, you need a
> better hash algorithm.
Actually, this was a slight overstatement. If you can do much better
than brute force, then. For password hashing, slight biases don't
really matter much - a work factor of 2^63 is about as good as a work
factor of 2^64, and most biases won't skew things by as much as a whole
bit.
Surprisingly, I've had students who had been
taught that ALL one-way
functions are completely and totally uncrackable.
I don't find that surprising - which fact I find somewhat depressing.
The only hash function that reveals nothing of its source data is one
that maps everything to the same value - and such a one fails
second-preimage resistance rather catastrophically. :-)
It will most likely be a nonsense string of
characters, rather than
the name of the user's canary, but it will work.
Not necessarily; for example,
if it contains NL or NUL characters,