On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 12:03:24PM -0700, Chris Petersen wrote: > it does. but md5 doesn't generate a unique id... there's no way that a > smallish number can be used to identify an infinite number of possible > email combinations.. so while md5 can be used to check integrity of data > (since the value will change when even one bit in the checked files > changes), it becomes inaccurate when you're trying to compare DIFFERENT > things, since you can have two vastly different source files that end up > with the same checksum. although this is a bit off topic, a similar > system could be desgned that would work around this.. maybe by using the > sa score and some kind of unique id generated by a part of the message > headers that wouldn't change for each user...
1) Razor uses SHA1, not MD5. 2) Either way, while you're correct (you _can_ have multiple inputs with the same resulting hash), it's very unlikely to find two sets of different data with the same hash output. So in reality, MD5/SHA1/etc aren't unique, but they're unlikely to be abused since finding the other data sets is really hard. -- Randomly Generated Tagline: "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." - Robert Wilensky, University of CA _______________________________________________________________ Hundreds of nodes, one monster rendering program. Now that’s a super model! Visit http://clustering.foundries.sf.net/ _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
