
Securing Your Java Code • Chapter 7 293
That is a lot of unique fingerprints that can be produced (in fact, the
number is impossible to comprehend), but this also means that there are
some messages that will have the same fingerprint.This is really nothing
to be worried about in practical terms, however, because it would be
extremely rare for two messages to have the same fingerprint. Even more
important, it is not possible to modify a message and still produce the
same fingerprint as the original. If we change just one byte in a message
the fingerprint will be radically different from the original fingerprint.
Actually, three algorithms in the Java SDK can ...