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I'm an amateur in this area too, but I'm not suggesting to avoid collisions, I'm suggesting adding a validation function for the hashed data so that if one were to generate an intentional collision, you would still have to contend with generating it in a way that also validated.

For Git, Linus basically says the validation function is a prepended type/length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719368

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Issue with that is we already addressed that during the MD5/cert collision era; the final cert, as delivered, would by definition contain additional data over the CSR (the signer reference and the start/end dates) but because that information was predictable, the collision could be generated for the expected emitted cert, rather than the input data. Same would apply to git; if you were building the submitted data block, you would know what type and length it was going to be, so could build it with that in mind while colliding.

The composition of the result of the original hash function and the result of that validation function can be taken together to be some larger function. Call that an uberhash. Such an uberhash is created by putting some number of bits in and getting some smaller number of bits out. There will unfortunately still be collisions. That trick is an improvement, and newer hashing algorithms contain similarly useful improvements to make creating collisions difficult.

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