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Naming All Lifeforms On Earth With Hash Functions

Posted by timothy on from the sort-of-a-nickname dept.

First time accepted submitter ssasa writes "A Virginia Tech researcher is proposing a new naming system for all life on earth [based on each organism's] genetic fingerprint — basically something like a hash function of an organism. Hash functions are in common use in software development. Hopefully it will pass some time before we see a hash collision between a cat and some dinosaur."

1 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Biology and Computer Science Two Way Street by utkonos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Last month, at ShmooCon a talk was given about spatial analysis of malware samples. The technique is borrowed directly from bioinformatics. This is a great example of techniques from Biology being used effectively in the IT security realm.

    I hope that the researcher involved in naming organisms based on hash algorithms chooses context triggered piecewise hashes (CTPH) AKA fuzzy hashing or a similarity hash algorithm rather than an algorithm like SHA512. Google's simhash or at least the ideas of this type of algorithm would lend itself much better to the naming of organisms.

    FYI: a FOSS implementation of fussy hashing is called ssdeep. The project site is here. This is an implementation that is widely used in open source malware analysis tools like Cuckoo Sandbox.