On Friday, December 30, 2011 11:19:46 AM Marko Vojinovic wrote: > You are basically saying that, given enough resources, you can precalculate > all hashes for all possible passwords in advance. > Can the same be said for keys? Given enough resources, you could precalculate > all possible public/private key combinations, right? Public key crypto's security is based on the cost of factoring and finding large prime numbers; hashing is somewhat different and relies on 'one-way' functions that are very difficult to reverse. There are similarities and some sharing between the algorithms, but the difficulty of reversal is based on different mathematical properties. However, at least for some hashes on some OS's, precalculation of partial hashes is no theory; lookup 'Rainbow Tables' some day. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_tables )