On Apr 16, 11:15 am, SpreadTooThin <bjobrie...@gmail.com> wrote: > And yes he is right CRCs hashing all have a probability of saying that > the files are identical when in fact they are not.
Here's the bottom line. It is either: A) Several hundred years of mathematics and cryptography are wrong. The birthday problem as described is incorrect, so a collision is far more likely than 42 trillion trillion to 1. You are simply the first person to have noticed it. B) Your software was buggy, or possibly the input was maliciously produced. Or, a really tiny chance that your particular files contained a pattern that provoked bad behaviour from MD5. Finding a specific limitation of the algorithm is one thing. Claiming that the math is fundamentally wrong is quite another. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list