Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace.
Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated.
I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois Field series. Someday..
I recently found his fingerprint algorithm and wrote a utility that uses it to find duplicate MIPS code for decompilation[0] and build unique identifiers that can be used to find duplicates without sharing any potentially copyrighted data[1].
This replaced some O(n²) searches through ASCII text, reducing search time from dozens of seconds to fractions of a second.
Important to note that FastCDC is about an order of magnitude for block deduplication and is generally considered the state of art for such an approach (speed of computing the hash is more important than absolutely optimal distribution of hashes).
I'm working on a data annotation system based around Rabin fingerprints. They're a really neat idea.
I especially like how if you end up with hash characteristics that you don't like, your can just select a different irreducible Galois polynomial and now you've got a whole new hash algorithm. It's like tuning to a different frequency.
For me it means I don't have to worry about cases where there aren't enough nearby fingerprints for the annotation to adhere to, I can just add or remove polynomials until I get a good density.
I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.
I used to regularly donate to the wikimedia foundation every year. I stopped doing that as I find the whole project is now a political tool and cannot be relied on. Even ignoring vandalism like here, sometimtes the same articles get different meanings depending on the language you view them in.
Different language editions of Wikipedia are completely different projects, with distinct user bases. You're never looking at the "same" article across languages.
Thank you! I’m a casual user of Wikipedia but after this thread I went through the history of edits on the article and...oh my.
I have a greater appreciation for folks like you and the other editors who seem to be constantly removing this type of stuf. Some truly horrendous slurs there.
The Wikipedia edit that this thread is discussing was as follows. I think it's worth printing it here to make the point that the commenter above you is completely right about the prevalence of anti-semitism in online discourse today:
> Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; September 1, 1931 – April 14, 2026) was a Jew (a.k.a. kike) rat computer scientist who was co-recipient, with Dana Scott, of the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their military research on efficiently culling goycattle in "Greater Israel".
Nothing about this edit is legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. It is pure anti-semitism. Rabin spent most of his career in the United States and worked in abstract mathematics.
I generally agree that legitimate criticism of Israel is often unfairly criticized as anti-semitic. I would like you to also acknowledge that many people on the left summarily dismiss blatant and rank anti-semitism, as you did here.
I commend you for the attempt, even if it’s clear that it’s falling on deaf ears to who you’re replying to.
The rest of us Jews appreciate that you didn’t let it slide.
It’s hard not to wonder why they even bothered clicking into this thread other than “oh the name sounds Jewish, I can push my narrative” especially with respect to their comment history.
I am not deaf to antisemitism. You (not only personally you of course), on the other hand, become wilfully deaf, blind, and speechless when people start talking about what is going on today in the Israeli society.
That’s quite a take to assume willful blindness to widespread suffering.
What is pretty clear though: your obsession with constantly minimizing the lived experience of a minority with “no ackshually they deserve it because they really are this way” warrants a look in the mirror.
Who the heck sets it as their antisemitism campaign to edit “vile X” and “X (aka rat)” on Jewish biographies. Normalizing slurs? I thought the goal of antisemites was to spread propaganda about how Jews are bad. Writing “X (aka BAD)” seems like the weakest possible attempt at that.
I don’t know what people elsewhere in this thread are going on about Israel for.
I think racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. who do that sort of thing aren’t doing it to convince anyone - it’s partially for shock value, partially to help normalize their attitudes and make other bigots feel more comfortable expressing their views, and partially to make the members of the group that they hate upset and feel unsafe.
This is the page history. Using the K word for Jewish people is antisemitic. There was no mention of his affiliation of IDF, in fact the page mentions he was released from service in order to pursue his academics.
I had the incredible good fortune to take one of his classes in college, and I loved it so much I took another just to learn from him again. A tremendous intellect AND an incredibly engaging and talented instructor. It would be an exaggeration to say that I knew him, but nevertheless he had a great impact on my education and my life. He will be missed.
Amazing man, with many important contributions over a very long career. The Rabin Cryptosystem (like RSA, but with public exponent 2) is notable for two reasons. First, unlike RSA, it is provably as hard as "factorization" (as he would call it), and second, unlike RSA, it wasn't protected by patent.
Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but from a practical point of view the most important are his contributions to cryptography.
After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography.
The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to marketing and advertising, because they founded a successful business.
In reality the RSA algorithm is superfluous and suboptimal. If the RSA team had never discovered this algorithm, that would have had a null impact on the practice of cryptography. Public-key cryptography would have been developed equally well, because the algorithms discovered by Merkle, Diffie, Hellman and Rabin are necessary and sufficient.
On the other hand, while without the publications of RSA, cryptography would have evolved pretty much in the same way, without the publications of Michael O. Rabin from the late seventies the development of public-key cryptography would have been delayed by some years, until someone else would have made the same discoveries.
Together with Ralph Merkle, Michael O. Rabin was the one who discovered the need for secure cryptographic hash functions, i.e. one-way hash functions, which are now critical for many applications, including digital signatures. Thus Rabin is the one who has shown how the previously proposed methods of digital signing must be used in practice. For example, the original signing algorithm proposed by RSA could trivially be broken and it became secure only in the modified form described by Rabin, i.e. with the use of a one-way hash function.
Originally, Merkle defined 2 conditions for one-way hash functions, of resistance to first preimage attacks and second preimage attacks, while Rabin defined 1 condition, of resistance to collision attacks. Soon after that it was realized that all 3 conditions are mandatory, so the 2 definitions, of Merkle and of Rabin, have been merged into the modern definition of such hash functions.
Unfortunately, both Merkle and Rabin have overlooked a 4th condition, of resistance to length extension attacks. This should have always been included in the definition of secure hash functions.
Because this 4th condition was omitted, the US Secure Hash Algorithm Standards defined algorithms that lack this property, which has forced many applications to use workarounds, like the HMAC algorithm, which for many years have wasted time and energy wherever encrypted communications were used, until more efficient authentication methods have been standardized, which do not use one-way hash functions, for instance GCM, which is today the most frequently used authentication algorithm on the Internet.
They didn't really found a successful business. They founded a middling business that didn't do much but license a patent until Security Dynamics, a smart card company, bought them and took over the name.
On the contrary, you cannot find frequently descriptions about the role of Michael O. Rabin in the creation of public-key cryptography, so few people are aware of it and I bet that no AI model can generate any text even remotely resembling this, because this information cannot be found in any single place in the possible training texts.
You can find definitions of secure hash functions everywhere, but pretty much nowhere you will find who are the authors of the conditions that are used in the modern definition and who have introduced the use of one-way hash functions.
I did not find this information anywhere, before reading the original publications of Rabin and Merkle from 1978/1979 and some later follow-up papers written by them.
You will not find this historical information in Wikipedia and I believe that it is important to know who are the true authors of the things that one uses daily. Connecting to this site or to any other site with https uses digital signatures that depend on the collision-resistant hash functions defined by Rabin and Merkle.
The Wikipedia article about Michael O. Rabin lists many of his achievements, but all those that are listed there are much less important than his contribution to the definition of the one-way hash functions, which lead to secure digital signatures.
Wikipedia mentions only the Rabin signature algorithm, but that has negligible importance, because it has been used only very rarely. On the other hand all other signature algorithms are based on the work of Rabin, by using secure hash functions.
I don't think that is AI slop. adrian_b often post long posts because he thinks he has a lot to say, but you can often tell that they contain his personal views and points that he thinks are important related to the discussions whereas actual AI slop tends to be bland and generic.
I wouldn’t really call that AI slop. Some people just write longer posts because they’ve got a lot they want to get across, and you can usually tell it reflects their own opinions and what they think matters in the discussion. Actual AI-generated stuff tends to come off more generic and lacks that personal angle.
"@dang" doesn't do anything last I heard (though at this point it's used often enough that maybe the HN folks should consider it). If you want to reach the mods you can contact hn@ycombinator.com I believe.
"As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher."
Interesting. Some people are lucky enough to find their vocation quite early in life.
> Benzion Netanyahu ... A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state.
Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated.
I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois Field series. Someday..
Thank you again!
This replaced some O(n²) searches through ASCII text, reducing search time from dozens of seconds to fractions of a second.
0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch 1 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch/wiki/Identifiers
I especially like how if you end up with hash characteristics that you don't like, your can just select a different irreducible Galois polynomial and now you've got a whole new hash algorithm. It's like tuning to a different frequency.
For me it means I don't have to worry about cases where there aren't enough nearby fingerprints for the annotation to adhere to, I can just add or remove polynomials until I get a good density.
e.g., x minus x is zero, even for Euler, so therefore…
Found on Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20210509160248/http://www.eecs.h...
I have a greater appreciation for folks like you and the other editors who seem to be constantly removing this type of stuf. Some truly horrendous slurs there.
> Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; September 1, 1931 – April 14, 2026) was a Jew (a.k.a. kike) rat computer scientist who was co-recipient, with Dana Scott, of the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their military research on efficiently culling goycattle in "Greater Israel".
Nothing about this edit is legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. It is pure anti-semitism. Rabin spent most of his career in the United States and worked in abstract mathematics.
I generally agree that legitimate criticism of Israel is often unfairly criticized as anti-semitic. I would like you to also acknowledge that many people on the left summarily dismiss blatant and rank anti-semitism, as you did here.
The rest of us Jews appreciate that you didn’t let it slide.
It’s hard not to wonder why they even bothered clicking into this thread other than “oh the name sounds Jewish, I can push my narrative” especially with respect to their comment history.
What is pretty clear though: your obsession with constantly minimizing the lived experience of a minority with “no ackshually they deserve it because they really are this way” warrants a look in the mirror.
I don’t know what people elsewhere in this thread are going on about Israel for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_O._Rabin&...
It got reverted soon after and I suspect you kept missing the worst of it.
https://youtu.be/L3FZzGU3n14
After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography.
The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to marketing and advertising, because they founded a successful business.
In reality the RSA algorithm is superfluous and suboptimal. If the RSA team had never discovered this algorithm, that would have had a null impact on the practice of cryptography. Public-key cryptography would have been developed equally well, because the algorithms discovered by Merkle, Diffie, Hellman and Rabin are necessary and sufficient.
On the other hand, while without the publications of RSA, cryptography would have evolved pretty much in the same way, without the publications of Michael O. Rabin from the late seventies the development of public-key cryptography would have been delayed by some years, until someone else would have made the same discoveries.
Together with Ralph Merkle, Michael O. Rabin was the one who discovered the need for secure cryptographic hash functions, i.e. one-way hash functions, which are now critical for many applications, including digital signatures. Thus Rabin is the one who has shown how the previously proposed methods of digital signing must be used in practice. For example, the original signing algorithm proposed by RSA could trivially be broken and it became secure only in the modified form described by Rabin, i.e. with the use of a one-way hash function.
Originally, Merkle defined 2 conditions for one-way hash functions, of resistance to first preimage attacks and second preimage attacks, while Rabin defined 1 condition, of resistance to collision attacks. Soon after that it was realized that all 3 conditions are mandatory, so the 2 definitions, of Merkle and of Rabin, have been merged into the modern definition of such hash functions.
Unfortunately, both Merkle and Rabin have overlooked a 4th condition, of resistance to length extension attacks. This should have always been included in the definition of secure hash functions.
Because this 4th condition was omitted, the US Secure Hash Algorithm Standards defined algorithms that lack this property, which has forced many applications to use workarounds, like the HMAC algorithm, which for many years have wasted time and energy wherever encrypted communications were used, until more efficient authentication methods have been standardized, which do not use one-way hash functions, for instance GCM, which is today the most frequently used authentication algorithm on the Internet.
He is a Turing Award winner.
On the contrary, you cannot find frequently descriptions about the role of Michael O. Rabin in the creation of public-key cryptography, so few people are aware of it and I bet that no AI model can generate any text even remotely resembling this, because this information cannot be found in any single place in the possible training texts.
You can find definitions of secure hash functions everywhere, but pretty much nowhere you will find who are the authors of the conditions that are used in the modern definition and who have introduced the use of one-way hash functions.
I did not find this information anywhere, before reading the original publications of Rabin and Merkle from 1978/1979 and some later follow-up papers written by them.
You will not find this historical information in Wikipedia and I believe that it is important to know who are the true authors of the things that one uses daily. Connecting to this site or to any other site with https uses digital signatures that depend on the collision-resistant hash functions defined by Rabin and Merkle.
The Wikipedia article about Michael O. Rabin lists many of his achievements, but all those that are listed there are much less important than his contribution to the definition of the one-way hash functions, which lead to secure digital signatures.
Wikipedia mentions only the Rabin signature algorithm, but that has negligible importance, because it has been used only very rarely. On the other hand all other signature algorithms are based on the work of Rabin, by using secure hash functions.
I really enjoyed reading it.
Interesting. Some people are lucky enough to find their vocation quite early in life.
> Benzion Netanyahu ... A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state.
Everything is intertwined at some level.
Interesting.