[cap-talk] use of hashcodes?

[Raoul Duke]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 6:49 PM, David Wagner <daw at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> As others have said, it's not really a matter of probability [1].

my thought was less about cracking and more about random dumb luck
debugging -- hey, suddenly we got a really weird response for our
request because hashes collided. of course unlikely. supposedly more
likely for one to get random hardware bugs instead, which is more of a
perspective i can grok.

> But let's put some perspective on it.  What are the chances that the
> SHA-256 hash is the weakest link in the security of Waterken?  I would
> say, that's exceedingly unlikely.  To turn it around, if SHA-256 is the
> weakest link, Tyler has done an absolutely brilliant job of software
> engineering.

given that i'm not thinking about somebody cracking, i'm thinking
about random dumb bad luck, i just wonder why we pick probabilistic
things when we really want something w/out collisions. of course the
answer is that in most cases we simply can't do that, we /have/ to
compress the state space. or at least that is what i figure, i was
wondering what alternatives people might have come up with.

sincerely.