5 ms·
MD5 is long-broken as a security mechanism, but as a broader identifier of hashes, a soft match (or matches with potential false positives) might actually be pr
by nkozyra 10y ago
MD5 is long-broken as a security mechanism, but as a broader identifier of hashes, a soft match (or matches with potential false positives) might actually be preferred. In this case it might not inherently be a bad idea to use (as opposed to for password hashing).
- colejohnson66 10y agoBut why use MD5 anyways? Google has quite an impressive image searching algorithm. Why not just use that? Using MD5 won't do anything because, almost certainly, a false positive is /not/ the same image. You'd need some kind of rolling hash that gets longer the longer the file is. Then do a soft check on that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- j-pb 10y agoBecause that would mean they have to train their networks on _huge_ amounts of actual child porn.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- emn13 10y agoActually, precisely for applications such as password hashing MD5 has not been broken. MD5 is broken only in collusion with the author of the original stream to be hashed. For passwords, that would mean an attacker who can pick the password and already has access to the system might be able to pick a password such that other passwords also grant access... who cares? Of course, irrespective of hash function you need to worry about weak passwords, so you'd need to use salting and an expensive stretching function, or only permit auto-generated passwords. But that's really not a weakness in the hashfunction; it's to mitigate weaknesses in the concept of a user-chosen password.