2 ms·
If I found one collision by accident, would that be any significant?
by mlajtos 5y ago
If I found one collision by accident, would that be any significant?
- saithound 5y agoYes, absolutely. It's technically possible to find SHA256 collisions accidentally, but it's so unlikely, that if you found one, it would merit serious investigation. People would not believe your statement that you found them accidentally, and "oh, I guess mlajtos really just found the colliding pair by chance" wouldn't be declared until after a very thorough investigation. In the meantime, major stakeholders (e.g. Bitcoin) would probably move away to another hash function, just in case. Dwyer calculated 1431168 NeuralHashes and found two collisions. Humanity collectively calculates over 120000000000000000000 SHA-256 hashes every second. Still, we're reasonably sure that this immense brute-force search will not lead to any collisions in any reasonable amount of time.
- jtsiskin 5y agoA good perspective on how big the SHA-256 hash space is: https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY