this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
105 points (81.1% liked)
Technology
59676 readers
3897 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because you cannot reverse a hash. Information is lost from the result.
So, I haven't read up on this quantum attack stuff, and I don't know what Kairos is referring to, but setting aside quantum computing for the moment, breaking a cryptographic hash would simply require being able to find a hash collision, finding another input to a hash function that generates the same hash. It wouldn't require being able to reconstitute the original input that produced the hash. That collision-finding can be done -- given infinite conventional computational capacity, at any rate -- simply from the hash; you don't need additional information.
Nobody is wanting to make a magical algorithm that gets the input to the hash.
I mean, there's provably at least one person who does, but there are infinite inputs that lead to the same hash.
Breaking a hash is being able to easily create new input data that leads to the same hash (with or without the constraint of needing the original input data)