Re^6: monastery mark-upedness (brute force)

[Fletch]

Quite right; at worst a naive dictionary of md5s for the entire 32 bit IPv4 range would be 64G ( ( 16 * 2**32 ) / ( 2**30 ) ) which would fit on a keychain these days (not to mention winnowing out multicast and unroutable addresses would shrink it from there). You'd want to toss in some sort of not-public salt so Eve can't do a dictionary attack (and maybe the salt used for anonomonks could move periodically so that it's constant over the life of a thread but varies unpredictably month-to-month).

[tye]

Who said I was going to announce the hashing algorithm used?

Yes, that is right, I'm talking about security through obscurity!

I was going to obscure the hashing algorithm used just like Fletch proposes obscuring the "not-public salt". But I considered that too obvious to mention since using a known hash on something as tiny as an IP address would be silly to the point of being stupid, no?

Thanks for mentioning that, Fletch. That interpretation would have likely never occurred to me. :)