Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

All we are demonstrating here is why Sha256 is 256 bits and not 32 bits. We have trivially identified collisions for the first 28 bits of the output, which is only 11% of the entire hash size.

Difficulty of collisions roughly doubles for each additional bit. Imagine we had a SHA32, that would be 16 times harder to achieve a collision. SHA256 is 43 with 67 zeroes behind it more difficult than the examples here.



Yeah, I forgot how many bits were in a hex digit and made it seem much harder than it really was to myself.


I also mess up base16 and either base 256 or base64 when doing Feynman estimates




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: