On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Russ Weeks <rwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Oscar, your point is well-taken re. the monotonic increase of the > timestamp. I guess the timestamp+random data key would have to be run > through ie. MD5 to make it suitable for consistent hashing, which adds > another layer of complexity to the collision analysis.
Indeed: once you rehash it, you're back to the birthday problem. I think a better approach would be to use a cipher with a fixed and published key and a blocksize equal to the timestamp. For instance, DES has a blocksize of 64 bits, so you could use this with a 64 bit timestamp. This would guarantee that you had a one-to-one mapping, which may not be the case if you just hash it. Best, -- P. Oscar Boykin http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Florida _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
