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That's not the same thing though. Plain text is a security risk because users tend to reuse passwords. If it's hashed then that wouldn't be the case, even if th
by Andrex 15y ago
That's not the same thing though. Plain text is a security risk because users tend to reuse passwords. If it's hashed then that wouldn't be the case, even if they can mine it or whatever.
- mcherm 15y agoIf the content of the email were hshed then the recipient couldn't read it!
- dredmorbius 15y agoThey could if it were a reversible key-based hash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function
- marshray 15y agoI believe you're thinking of a 'cipher'. Cryptographic hashes (even keyed ones) are expected to be one-way functions.
- dredmorbius 15y agoCould be my bad here, but I said "reversible key-based", which isn't what most cryptographic one-way hashes are. For ASCII text, modulo 13 is a reversible operation (a/k/a rot13). It's not key-based, may not be a hash, and I'm not aware of any specifically key-based hashes, but that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Fully admitting winging this one though.
- marshray 15y agoWell your Wikipedia link was about cryptographic hash functions so I figured that's what you intended to refer to. So when you wrote "key-based hashes", I interpreted that as meaning a cryptographic hash-like function with key input, e.g. HMAC the "Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code". Modulo 13 is different than rot13. Modulo 13 is actually a hash function, whereas rot13 is a permutation. If rot13 took a key (e.g. if it were rotN instead) it would make a primitive cipher. But it doesn't, so it behaves like a cipher that is always used with a fixed key or a cipher the key is already decided in the context of discussion. The process of applying a specific key to a cipher is called "keying". So just to make things even more confusing, we could perhaps refer to rotN<N = 13> (AKA "rot13") then as a "keyed cipher". :-)
- mukyu 15y agoWhat the hell are you talking about? Google is not storing hashes of your emails instead of the emails. How is anything under discussion related to passwords?
- Andrex 15y agoI'm sorry, I misunderstood. The parent comment didn't mention emails being in plaintext, but just "Gmail." I took that as meaning passwords.