Re: sort -R: a more-conservative approach

[Paul Eggert]

Frederik Eaton <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, I guess it's only a factor of two, but there's a difference
> between bugs that cause a segfault in a tool that many people use, and
> bugs that might cause a new feature with 0 existing users to not be
> 100% cryptographically secure.

I'm sympathetic to this argument, and in fact had toyed with the idea
of using something much simpler and faster like buzhash
<https://www.se.auckland.ac.nz/courses/SOFTENG250/archive/2004/lectures/hamer-5.pdf>,
perhaps at the user's option.  buzhash is not cryptographically secure
but should work well with any data that is not designed by an
attacker.

For a cryptographically secure function, a good choice might be a hybrid
CW/UHASH approach, as suggested by Crosby and Wallach
<http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/>.

But all this can wait until somebody has more time....