OpenID9 items tagged “hashing”
Hash Collisions (The Poisoned Message Attack). Demonstrates the MD5 weakness by providing two deliberately engineered PostScript documents with the same MD5 hash but radically different rendered output. 
4th April 2008, 7:24 pm
Consistent Hashing. Beautifully clear explanation of consistent hashing, a simple technique that allows you to add new caching servers to a cluster without re-hashing your keys and hence invalidating all of your caches. 18th March 2008, 1 am
In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon. 
23rd October 2007, 10:39 pm
libketama (via) A consistent hashing algorithm for memcache clients, from the team at last.fm. 20th April 2007, 6:50 am
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them. 23rd January 2007, 1:39 pm
Schneier on Security: Cryptanalysis of SHA-1. If you want to understand the “breaking” of SHA-1, this is the place to go. Surprisingly accessible. 19th February 2005, 3:12 pm
Schneier on Security: SHA-1 Broken. Whoa. 16th February 2005, 4:47 am
Signing comments on blogs
Adrian Holovaty has implemented reserved comment names in his blog, a feature that prevents anyone apart from him from using the names “Adrian”, “Adrian H.” or “Adrian Holovaty” when posting a comment. François Nonnenmacher suggests extending the idea to allow people to “confirm” their authorship of comments on any blog using a TrackBack sent to their site that in turn causes them to be sent an alert email, which they can then use to confirm their comment. I like his idea of authentication based on URLs (email addresses are no good; they should not be publically displayed for fear of spam harvesters) but I think I’ve come up with an alternative authentication scheme that removes the need for the user to manually confirm authorship. This is pretty complicated, so bare with me. [... 762 words]
Hashing client-side data
Via Scott, a clever PHP technique for ensuring data sent to the browser as a cookie or hidden form variable isn’t tampered with by the user: [... 248 words]
