Re: [TLS] Consensus Call: FNV vs SHA1

[Nicolas Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 09:38:31AM -0700, Michael D'Errico wrote:
> With a birthday collision of 64 bits (thanks Dave for reminding me of
> this), you would need about 6 million server certificates to achieve a
> probability of 1 in a million that 2 of those 6 million certificates
> hash to the same value.  Since servers change certificates about once
> a year, and a client doesn't need to remember any hashes of expired
> certificates, and there is no problem if the certificates of unrelated
> servers collide, this seems to be a non-issue.

I agree that collisions will be extremely unlikely.  My concern is how
to recover from them if they occur.

> The only question is whether FNV is as good of a hash function as is
> required to resist the birthday attack.  My simple test showed that it
> might be, but IANAC and don't know how to determine that.

Based on a gut feeling I'd rather go with a cryptographic hash if
collision resistance is desired.  (Though, of course collision
resistance is not the same thing as having a low rate of collisions
with real world inputs.)

Nico
--