Password entropy

Joe Thomas jthomas at access.digex.net
Tue Jul 5 20:18:10 PDT 1994


On Mon, 4 Jul 1994 wcs at anchor.ho.att.com wrote:

> On the other hand, collisions are infrequent - the probability of a
> pair of numbers having the same MD5 value is presumed to be 2**-128,
> and the usual birthday paradox calculations apply, so you'll probably
> find one if you take 2**64 random samples.

Minor quibble:  It might be better to say that you'll probably *have* one 
if you take 2**64 random samples.  Finding the pair would be pretty hard, 
and you'd need a lot of storage in the meantime.

Joe






More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list