Re: [xmpp] IQ Handling vulnerabilities

[Alexander Holler <[e-mail]>]

Am 11.02.2014 18:06, schrieb Dave Cridland:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Alexander Holler <[e-mail]>wrote:
>
>> which I interpret such, that, besides using a hash from hash (so no new
>> source), the ID consists of just the first 10 characters of the 40 of a
>> sha1. And then you argument with the collision rate of sha1?
>>
>>
> Oh, I see what you mean now.
>
> Yes, on that model the collision would probably happen much sooner.
>
> It's a collision space of 2^40, though, so a birthday attack would hit
> after about 1.3 million stanzas by my calculations. The chance of this
> causing a problem seems pretty low.

Based on the assumption that a hash of a hash has the same collision 
space as the hash itself.

Since I'm long out of university and academics and I'm unfortunately 
quiet out of practice in dealing with maths (even if I liked to do so, 
but math isn't needed that often in real world computing than 
universities tend to teach), I'm not going into a discussion about how 
(un)likely it is that two consequent outputs of such a homegrewn 
algorithm (sorry for that term) are different.

I just wanted to raise awareness that whatever is used should still 
produce unique numbers (for a short period of time) and not just numbers 
which are unpredictable. It's easy to predict that a serial counter is 
unique for some time, but I don't see that when someone uses a series 
like whateverhash(whateverhash(...) and I wouldn't trust such without 
having a deeper look at it.

Regards,

Alexander Holler