The spinach story reminds me a lot on the false recommendation of siphash for hash table DDOS prevention. https://github.com/rurban/smhasher#security https://gi

The spinach story reminds me a lot on the false recommendation of siphash for hash table DDOS prevention. https://github.com/rurban/smhasher#security https://github.com/rurban/smhasher#security The authors came up in their widely cited paper with a proper solution to spread the random hash seed into the inner loop, vastly enhancing its security by avoiding trivial hash collision attacks. But a secure, slow hash function can never prevent from normal hash seed attacks, when the random seed is known somehow. esp. with dynamic languages it's trivial to get the seed externally. Other trivial countermeasures must be used then, which also don't make hash tables 10x slower, keeping them practical.