Post Archive - January 0001 wharbargle


Posts tagged cryptography

code security

One of the things that comes up when sending data over the internet is verifying that it hasn't been corrupted. This is generally a simple thing to resolve: send the data and a good hash (MD5 or SHA-1) of the data together. Recompute the hash on the client side and compare it to the hash you sent. If any bits have changed, the two won't match, and you know you need to redownload the file. I suppose it's possible both the data and hash could be corrupted in such a way that they match, but if your hash function is any good then the likelihood of this happening by chance is so astonishingly low that it doesn't bear consideration. ... Read more