On Wednesday 10 July 2002 02:38 pm, Claus Lund wrote:
Yup. Several different passwords could very well generate the same hashed string.
But the point of a hash algorithm is to make this possibility extremely unlikely. This is, in fact, a measure of the quality of the hash algorithm: How likely is it that two different input values can yield the same output? When that does happen, it is a hash collision. I say this for the benefit of the folks who asked the original question; I know that Claus knows this already. :-) Scott -- -----------------------+------------------------------------------------------ Scott Courtney | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them courtney@4th.com | having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds http://4th.com/ | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999) | PGP Public Key at http://4th.com/keys/courtney.pubkey