Re: subjective names and MITM

[Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>]

Adam Shostack writes:
>	The key does indeed have a high likelihood of being unique,
>but dealing with 1024 bit identifiers could strain database systems,
>especially when 100 well chosen bits would be than enough.

Hence the suggestion to use a hash of the key instead of the key
itself.  Someone pointed out that a uniformly distributed 1024 bit
prime has something like 1014 bits of entropy.  An md5 hash of the key
should have about 128 bits of entropy, with the probability of a
collision among 2^33 keys (one per person, worldwide) being about
1 in 2^95, or about 1 in 10^29.  Sounds like we're safe, even without
straining our databases.