On 2/4/07, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Probably a grey area, since if it really is an irreversible hash (at least, as far as we know the hash function to be so, and we all know how crap some hashes have proven to be), then it's not supposedly possible to arbitrarily obtain IP addresses.
Not really. If it's just a single MD5 application, say, then four billion applications to get a complete rainbow table would be simple. If it's something such that a single application is slow enough to take a couple of seconds on an average computer, you'd need to put a bit more effort into cracking it (distributed computing via a large botnet, say), but it would still be at least theoretically possible, and slow enough to be distinctly annoying for the end user to boot.