Alright, I'm asking for no other reason than the fact that I'm curious. I don't believe with any sort of existing hardware would this be possible, but you know how you have checksums\file hashes right?
Would it be possible, in theory, to decrypt this hash into a program, image, or what have you? Also at what point in time would you think we'd have powerful enough hardware to achieve this to the point where downloading a hash of a 3 GB program would be more viable than say downloading at 5 MBps?
I'm just curious and it's a ludicrous idea.
No, it would be impossible to decrypt a hash.
Okay, by decrypt I mean like brute force.
Theoretically, if you discard the fact that an image will be a massive set of data (say, 2MB = 2^16777216 bits = a number made up of 5,050,446 digits), yeah, you can eventually "recover" the image by brute forcing bits.
You will, of course, encounter many collisions, which may or may not look like a real image, so can't be sure whether the original image was recovered or not.
Of course, all of this can't be done in our Universe's lifetime.
(10-16-2013, 04:43 AM)Rolf Wrote: [ -> ]Theoretically, if you discard the fact that an image will be a massive set of data (say, 2MB = 2^16777216 bits = a number made up of 5,050,446 digits), yeah, you can eventually "recover" the image by brute forcing bits.
You will, of course, encounter many collisions, which may or may not look like a real image, so can't be sure whether the original image was recovered or not.
Of course, all of this can't be done in our Universe's lifetime.
What about quantum computing or a non-silicon based computer? Like a photonic CPU or GPU? Or is there any sort of way perhaps non-hash related, that could take a string of characters that seem to mean nothing and perform a certain calculation to make it come out to be said image or file?
I don't think that even a cluster array of CPU/GPUs made up of room temperature superconductors, which were shaped into 1 nm transistors would help.
So yeah, not going to happen anytime soon (if at all).