[null and void]

Yes. But even if a hash code can't be back processed to yield your password, it can potentially be processed to yield a password that will access your account.

And THAT, sir, is every bit as dangerous and requires no technological breakthrough whatsoever, just a look-up table that says if they give you this hash code, use this string as the password.

I bet the "an assay" could generate such a table in an afternoon.

I'm not going to be the one to insist man can never _____ (go faster than 30 mph, fly, go to the moon, etc.), but by all means, don't let that stop you!

[cynwoody]

just a look-up table that says if they give you this hash code, use this string as the password.

That would be a rather large look-up table. E.g., the standard hash function these days is SHA1. Here is what it returns for 'null and void' as a password:

>>> from sha import sha
>>> sha('null and void').hexdigest()
'd8d8e866fb92a6b275dee8890ec80ad0776e1306'
>>> int('d8d8e866fb92a6b275dee8890ec80ad0776e1306', 16)
1237979212554367229448322411207458778802755080966L
>>> int('d8d8e866fb92a6b275dee8890ec80ad0776e1306', 16)/1e12
1.2379792125543673e+36

Even after dividing it by a trillion, we're still looking at a number with 37 digits to the left of the decimal point.

It would be much more efficient to brute-force all the 13-character strings until we happen upon 'null and void', running the SHA algorithm in parallel in a rack full of GPUs.