Re: Call to atention about using hash functions as content indexers(SCM saga)

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:

> Dear diary, on Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 12:40:21AM CEST, I got a letter
> where Pedro Larroy <piotr@xxxxxxxxxx> told me that...
> > Hi
>
> Hello,
>
> > I had a quick look at the source of GIT tonight, I'd like to warn you
> > about the use of hash functions as content indexers.
> >
> > As probably you are aware, hash functions such as SHA-1 are surjective not
> > bijective (1-to-1 map), so they have collisions. Here one can argue
> > about the low probability of such a collision, I won't get into
> > subjetive valorations of what probability of collision is tolerable for
> > me and what is not.
> >
> > I my humble opinion, choosing deliberately, as a design decision, a
> > method such as this one, that in some cases could corrupt data in a
> > silent and very hard to detect way, is not very good. One can also argue
> > that the probability of data getting corrupted in the disk, or whatever
> > could be higher than that of the collision, again this is not valid
> > comparison, since the fact that indexing by hash functions without
> > additional checking could make data corruption legal between the
> > reasonable working parameters of the program is very dangerous.
>
> (i) 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976 possible SHA1 hashes.
>
> (ii) In git-pasky, there's (turnable off) detection of collisions.
>
> (iii) Your argument against comparing with the probability of a hardware
> error does not make sense to me.
>
> (iv) You fail to propose a better solution.
>
> --
> 				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
> Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
> 98% of the time I am right. Why worry about the other 3%.

This is a standard, free (no patents) hash-function that works.
The fact that somebody can write a program, designed to create
collisions, and demonstrate that after many weeks of processing,
iteratively building upon the previous result, and finally
cause a collision, really isn't relevant for this application.

There is a good possibility that there are no hash-functions
that can't be broken.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.11 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
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