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You are. One of the defining properties of a cryptographic hash is that you cannot easily deduce the input given the output, nor can you easily construct an input to produce a given output. (see the overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash)

However, it's still possible to do a dictionary attack on the database of hashes ("is the hash of "password" the same as the user's password hash? yes? Bingo!")



You should use individual salting for each password to make this at least a bit more difficult.


Provided, of course, that P != NP.


Message digest functions are not, generally, number-theoretic.


How is this relevant? The question of P ?= NP isn't limited to number-theoretic functions -- if P = NP then it is possible to find a preimage to any (polynomial time) hash function in polynomial time.


You're right.




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