On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:14:57 EDT, T Biehn said:
Soliciting random suggestions.
Lets say I have data to one-way-hash.
The set has 9,999,999,999 members.
Actually, if you're using a 10-digit decimal field, you probably have 10**10
possible members - all-zeros counts too (unless there's *other* reasons zero
isn't a legal ID). It's those little off-by-one errors that tend to get you.
;)
It's relatively easy to brute force this, or create precomp tables.
That's because you only have 10M billion members to brute force against.
So you add a salt to each.
A better idea cryptographically would be to fix the 10**10 member limit, so
that the set *could* have a much higher possible number of members. Even
staying at 10 characters, but allowing [A-Za-z0-9] (62 possible chars) raises
your space to 62**10 or about 8.3*10**17 (or almost 10M times the difficuly).
That's why most symmetric crypto algorithms use at least 64-bit or even larger
keys, and even larger for RSA and similar public-key systems.
