Internal security of Rev?

[Richard Gaskin]

John Tregea wrote:

> I read about MD5 but thought it was a way of generating a hash string 
> and using that string to check if the originating string had changed. Do 
> you mean I could "un" MD5 a string like base64Decode?

MD5 is used to create a "signature" of a chunk of data which is 
mathematically improbable to have been derived by a different chunk. 
This is useful for comparing two things when you don't have the things 
themselves, such as passwords, but the MD5 result doesn't contain enough 
data to derive its source.

However one can use it in place of a password, so you can compare 
password results without ever embedding the password itself.

This extremely lightweight encryption function uses MD5 for that purpose:
<http://www.revjournal.com/tutorials/handy-handlers-005.html>

While that particular function is at the "toy" level of security, 
stronger methods could be made which use MD5 in related ways.

But all of this seems a red herring, if I've read this thread correctly. 
  At first I had the impression we were talking about protecting 
critical data, but in later posts it seems we're just talking about 
anti-piracy.

With all due respect, the best investment of your time with regard to 
anti-piracy is to ignore it altogether and put the time into features, 
marketing, and offering world-class support.  Pirates are rarely in the 
intersection of potential customers, so fighting them is a business 
distraction.

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  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com