Firewall Wizards: Re: strong passwords

[miha () nil si]

Barney Wolff wrote:

> You're looking at the wrong number.  The Birthday Paradox means that
> *if you have 2^64 things* you've got about a 50:50 chance of finding two
> that hash to the same value.  But you still have to look at about
> 2^127 things to find one with a hash equal to a desired one.  You're
> much wiser to attack the password itself than MD5.

Now, I don't have my copy of Applied Cryptography ready, but isn't 50:50 
chance much too high? If I remember correctly it is more in the lines of: 
birthday attacks are possible, just not very likely, but finding something 
that hashes to the same value as a specific text/password is next to 
impossible ( very hard ).

Yes/No/Maybe?

---
  Miha Vitorovic

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