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Use of hashes in Bazaar-NG
**************************
* http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/review/hash.html
* http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/review/hash2.html
The main attraction of hashes in bazaar-ng is as an easy way to get
universally-unique IDs, or at least with a low chance of collision:
The first paper is a bit paranoid; the second has some sensible
advice:
1. Will compare-by-hash provide significant benefit -- save time,
bandwidth, etc?
2. Is the system usable if hash collisions can be generated at will?
3. Can the hashes be regenerated with a different algorithm at any
time?
We should try to abide by these rules. I think they are possibly too
paranoid -- a real break of SHA-1 would have much wider security
implications -- but if a design that respects them is practical, it
should be preferred.
The first is probably true; the third is just a matter of making sure
we allow for the choice of hash to be varied in the format.
There are actually two variations on the second:
2a. Is the system safe if an attacker can generate hash collisions?
2b. Is the system safe if a user's own files contain collisions.
Regardless of cryptographic weakness, SHA-1 is unlikely to
"accidentally" collide, but it's possible that someone will
intentionally generate collisions (in research on SHA) and then want
to store them. It would be unfortunate if that did not work.
An advantage of naming by hash is that it lets us store only a single
copy of identical files, but we have already decided__ that disk space
is pretty cheap. It is perhaps enough to have a single copy of files
that do not change from one tree revision to the next.
__ costs.html
As far as an attacker: we will not automatically trust that ids from
one branch have the same value in another. It is possible for a
branch to contain "lies" about its history or contents, but that
doesn't corrupt anything else. It may confuse or mislead someone who
looks at the branch, but there is no substitute for human review
anyhow.
-------
The safest position may be to never rely on identifying content by
hash. Rather, things which need a universally unique ID should get a
UUID instead.
This has a slight advantage that the id can be stored directly in the
object it refers to, when that's useful.
So a `Revision` holds a UUID for the `Inventory`.
An inventory holds `InventoryEntry` objects, each with
* file-id
* filename (location in tree)
* type (file, dir, etc)
* text-id (uuid identifying the text)
* text-sha1
* text-length (for catching bugs)
* parent-file-id
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