wedrifid comments on Easy Predictor Tests - Less Wrong

11 Post author: MrHen 21 January 2010 06:40PM

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Comment author: RobinZ 21 January 2010 11:11:08PM *  0 points [-]

I will not predict that my prediction will be wrong. That would be silly.

I have a file in my home directory which includes my prediction, along with some extraneous text. md5 hash of this file: cc58112f13e9e92495782bac4a9443bc

Edit: wedrifid and AngryParsley have correctly informed me that md5 is broken. sha1 hash: 0cc4e8bd90a897c2f0d0c561780f69561b7af072

Comment author: wedrifid 21 January 2010 11:49:55PM 1 point [-]

MD5? Colluder!

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 01:08:31AM 0 points [-]

I get ... a reference? All I know about MD5 is that (1) it shows up in the same UNIX man page as sha1, (2) it's a command in Macintosh UNIX, and (3) it's a cryptographic hash.

I'm really just ripping off AngryParsley.

Comment author: AngryParsley 22 January 2010 01:17:27AM 2 points [-]

MD5 isn't very useful as a cryptographic hash these days. It's not hard to find collisions for a given hash or create two plaintexts with the same hash. In fact, this has been used to create a rogue certificate authority. SHA-1 is looking pretty weak, but finding or constructing collisions with it is still infeasible.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 01:26:48AM *  0 points [-]

To quote a certain BBC television presenter: oh, cock. Is there a better cryptographic hash than those two commonly available?

Edit: Let me clarify - of course they're out there, but I was hoping to pick something which is very easy to find, install, and use among those interested. (Anything with a reputable website I could link to for Windows & UNIX downloads would be fine, I'm sure.)

Comment author: AngryParsley 22 January 2010 01:34:25AM *  2 points [-]

Yup. There's SHA-2 and some other algorithms. Right now the NIST is holding a contest for SHA-3. It's narrowed down to 14 candidates. The winner will be announced in 2012.

ETA: Really though, unless you're some super-spy, SHA-1 should be good enough until stronger hashes become common.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 02:01:37AM 0 points [-]

I don't even have SHA-2 on my computer - SHA-1 hash added to original comment.

Comment author: AngryParsley 22 January 2010 02:21:05AM *  0 points [-]

shasum should support all the algorithms:

ggreer@carbon:~$ echo "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" | shasum -a 224 62e514e536e4ed4633eeec99d60f97b4d95889227975d975b2ad0de3 -

ggreer@carbon:~$ echo "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" | shasum -a 512 a12ac6bdd854ac30c5cc5b576e1ee2c060c0d8c2bec8797423d7119aa2b962f7f30ce2e39879cbff0109c8f0a3fd9389a369daae45df7d7b286d7d98272dc5b1 -

Take a look at the shasum man pages for more parameters.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 January 2010 03:35:31AM 0 points [-]

Unfortunately, I don't have shasum on my MacBook - I had to use openssl.

Comment author: AngryParsley 22 January 2010 03:38:55AM 0 points [-]

Are you using an earlier version of OS X? I'm on 10.6 and it looks like shasum comes with 10.6.

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