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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:19:12 ADT
Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
29 Jun 1998 17:36:55 -0400
Re: when to truncate hashes, and when not to.
If you are using a hash as a MAC, as in HMAC, truncation makes
inversion of the MAC harder, so a (small) amount of truncation is
actually a good thing. If you are using a hash in a signature scheme,
however, truncation increases vulnerability to birthday attacks. So
truncation is sometimes very good and sometimes very bad. As with all
cryptography, it is not a game for amateurs -- you have to know what
you are doing.
Perry
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:19:12 ADT