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Technically, a software project does not have to worry about collisions for hashes verifying their releases. That only becomes a problem where there is some sor
by upofadown 3y ago
Technically, a software project does not have to worry about collisions for hashes verifying their releases. That only becomes a problem where there is some sort of trusted third party that can be tricked into authenticating one of a pair of collided hashes.
There is a usability issue here. A 256 bit hash is so long as to be very hard to manually compare. A project might want to keep the length down to something reasonable.
- zcw100 3y agoOr find ways to easily compare them without doing it manually.
- Vecr 3y agoChopping (drop the first x bits) sha256 to 180 bits is probably the most secure way to go, see Block-Cipher-Based Tree Hashing by Aldo Gunsing. Bitcoin uses RIPEMD180 so the length is probably fine, but it has other properties that make chopped sha256 a better idea (length extension attacks for example).