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> In any case, if you consider my email address "personally identifiable information", I consider its checksum such information as well. I wonder what the odds

> In any case, if you consider my email address "personally identifiable information", I consider its checksum such information as well. I wonder what the odds are on a hash collision from another email address (including abusing + addressing) that genuinely belongs to another person (rather than just exists) and therefore the resulting hash does not uniquely identify a single person.

shabble 12y ago
Very, very small. The 'birthday attack'[0] article covers this pretty well, but if we take the output size of a SHA-1 hash as 160 bits, and assume it's outputs are equally distributed[1], a brute-force approach (equivalent to a non-maliciously generated accidental collision across all addresses ever) is: sqrt(2**160 * PI/2) ~= 1.5 x10**24 for there to be a 50% probability of a collision occurring. (if I understood/got the maths right) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack [1] This is the intent of all hash functions, and I don't think there are any fundamental attributes of email addresses that would cause systematic bias in the output
- tomp 12y ago
  To put things into perspective: Approximately, 10^3 = 1000 ~= 1024 = 2^10, 10^2 = 100 ~= 128 = 2^7. Assume you have 1 billion (10^9) computers, each computer can do 1 billion hashing operations per second. That is 10^18 operations per second combined. Rounding up, one day has 1 million seconds (10^6), and one year has 1000 (10^3) days. So, we have 10^27 ~= 2^90 operations per year. 100 million years is 10^8 ~= 2^27. So, you have 2^117 operations in 100 million years. Geologically, there was an Extinction Event [1] about every 100 million years (e.g. 66, 200 and 251 million years ago). So, having an (unintentional) hash collision in more than 128 bits (assuming a good hash function that has uniformly distributed hash) is less likely than an event happening within the next second that kills 50% of the Earth's species. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

shabble 12y ago

Very, very small. The 'birthday attack'[0] article covers this pretty well, but if we take the output size of a SHA-1 hash as 160 bits, and assume it's outputs are equally distributed[1], a brute-force approach (equivalent to a non-maliciously generated accidental collision across all addresses ever) is: sqrt(2**160 * PI/2) ~= 1.5 x10**24 for there to be a 50% probability of a collision occurring. (if I understood/got the maths right) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack [1] This is the intent of all hash functions, and I don't think there are any fundamental attributes of email addresses that would cause systematic bias in the output

tomp 12y ago
To put things into perspective: Approximately, 10^3 = 1000 ~= 1024 = 2^10, 10^2 = 100 ~= 128 = 2^7. Assume you have 1 billion (10^9) computers, each computer can do 1 billion hashing operations per second. That is 10^18 operations per second combined. Rounding up, one day has 1 million seconds (10^6), and one year has 1000 (10^3) days. So, we have 10^27 ~= 2^90 operations per year. 100 million years is 10^8 ~= 2^27. So, you have 2^117 operations in 100 million years. Geologically, there was an Extinction Event [1] about every 100 million years (e.g. 66, 200 and 251 million years ago). So, having an (unintentional) hash collision in more than 128 bits (assuming a good hash function that has uniformly distributed hash) is less likely than an event happening within the next second that kills 50% of the Earth's species. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event