On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
Actually, this greatly increases the chance of a collision. 123456789 will collide with 123456780.Can't we just truncate the password to 8 characters like in the old daysbefore doing the MD5 hash? It will greatly reduce the chance of a collision.In fact, I am not even sure my systems don't do this already.
I was talking about limiting the input, not the output. I assumed it would be more difficult to find a collision when there are less degrees of freedom in the input. What I realised after my mail though, is that it is probably pretty easy to prebuild a dictionary of all 8 character combinations and their MD5 sums. Paul