[OT] Redundancy eliminating file systems, breaking MD5, donatingmoney to OSDL

From: Timothy Miller
Date: Fri Jan 16 2004 - 15:26:13 EST


Recently, I saw a slashdot article that pointed to a site dedicated to breaking MD5. That is, so far, no one has found any two differing string which have the same MD5 cksum. Logically, however, there WILL be collisions for any strings longer than the MD5 cksum itself -- we just haven't found any. Well, there's some sort of contest where you can win money for breaking MD5 (I think).

Even further back, there was an LKML discussion about various sorts of compressing file systems. One of the subthreads discussed identifying identical blocks (using MD5) and pointing them at the same physical block on disk. Naturally, if there WERE two blocks with the same MD5, we'd want to check the raw data, just to be sure that there wasn't a false positive.

Think about it! If we had a filesystem that actually DID this, and it was in the Linux kernel, it would spread far and wide. It's bound to happen that someone will identify a collision. We then report that to the committee offering the reward and then donate it to OSDL to help Linux development.



Yeah, I know... I'm a dork.

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