On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Josh Coates wrote:<snip/>
bunch of other hashes, that was big news. A bunch of people said "hey, it's just a collision, we already knew hash functions have collisions," but they didn't realize that in a truly secure hash function, *we'll never ever see even a single one*. And sure enough, people like Kaminsky are showing that
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ <snip/>
The only formal training I've had in hashes and hash buckets was in CS235, so this might not be a good question, considering my limited know-how.
But I was wondering how you could have a hash function that never has a single collision? Wouldn't you need 'infinity' number of hash-buckets for that to happen. And all you can do is approach infinity (limits toward infinity -> oo) but never have an actual 'infinity' number of buckets. So all we try to do is to raise the number of buckets beyond such a large value that it is almost infinity (like all that hand-waving we do in math classes :). Does this mean that we can never, ever have a completely secure hash function??
o.O -- Harshwardhan Nagaonkar Brigham Young University Provo, UT - 84602
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