How long can a hash left out in the open be considered safe?

Posted by Xeoncross on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Xeoncross
Published on 2011-01-14T02:48:11Z Indexed on 2011/01/14 2:53 UTC
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If I were to leave a SHA2 family hash out on my website - how long would it be considered safe? How long would I have before I could be sure that someone would find a collision for it and know what was hashed?

I know that the amount of time would be based on the computational power of the one seeking to break it. It would also depend on the string length, but I'm curious just how secure hashes are.

Since many of us run web-servers we constantly have to be prepared for the day when someone might make it all the way to the database which stores the user hashes. So, move the server security out of the way and then what do you have?

This is a slightly theoretical area for many of the people I have talked with, so I would love to actually have some more information about average expectations for cracking.

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