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I’ve done the math for how long it’d take to randomly guess the last several kilobytes until something checksummed correctly.
I was not pleased with the answer.
26 points
14 points
On average it’ll take 2^(n-1) guesses to reconstruct 2^n bits, so… depends on how many hashes / sec you can do.
15 points
Haha agreed, if we’re talking about kilobytes of missing data brute forcing is intractable.
There may be structure to exploit in the data format. E.g. if you’re recovering missing content from a book written in English, you can probably get away with enumerating only printable ASCII and 90% of the letters will be lowercase.
But practically, I am unconvinced because the information density is pretty high on the kinds of things people like to torrent.
4 points
4 points
