Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:06 ADT
Anonymous (nobody@replay.com)
Mon, 6 Jul 1998 22:01:01 +0200
Alex Alten's point about knowing the internal structure of the hash
is relevant and valid. Specifically, can we agree that:
"If you are going to truncate a hash, you should be aware of the internal
structure of the hash so that you know how much you are weakening it."
You could imagine a hash in which not all output bits are equally strong.
In that case, truncation would have to be done with care, as you might
be inadvertantly discarding strong bits and leaving weak ones.
Before you object that no hash would have this property, consider a hash
scheme used occasionally, a concatenation of SHA-1 and MD5. Most people
would (tentatively) consider SHA-1 stronger than MD5 (even on a per-bit
basis), hence any truncation would be better done from the MD5 part than
from the SHA-1 part.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:06 ADT