Justin Karneges wrote:
Apologies for not understanding this thread at all and just commenting out of
nowhere, but what security is gained by using a hash in the caps protocol?
If there is no security gained by using a hash (e.g. everyone has access to
the raw data such that they can all calculate the same hash) then what
difference does it make which algorithm is used?
What if the raw data is supplied by the attacker?
Imagine Eve wants to poison the caches of clients that haven't yet
received presence from a brand new release of Psi.
If it is easy to discover collisions for the hash used by Psi, then Eve
can send Psi's hash to a client and respond to its resulting disco
request with a false set of features that she generated earlier. The
false set would probably include a single unrecognizable feature whose
'var' value could be manipulated to ensure the set has the correct hash
value, for example:
<feature var='[EMAIL PROTECTED]'/>.
- Ian
