The Rabin fingerprinting scheme is a method for implementing fingerprints using polynomials over a finite field. It was proposed by Michael O. Rabin.
Contents
Scheme
Given an n-bit message m0,...,mn-1, we view it as a polynomial of degree n-1 over the finite field GF(2).
We then pick a random irreducible polynomial
Applications
Many implementations of the Rabin–Karp algorithm internally use Rabin fingerprints.
The Low Bandwidth Network Filesystem (LBFS) from MIT uses Rabin fingerprints to implement variable size shift-resistant blocks. The basic idea is that the filesystem computes the cryptographic hash of each block in a file. To save on transfers between the client and server, they compare their checksums and only transfer blocks whose checksums differ. But one problem with this scheme is that a single insertion at the beginning of the file will cause every checksum to change if fixed-sized (e.g. 4 KB) blocks are used. So the idea is to select blocks not based on a specific offset but rather by some property of the block contents. LBFS does this by sliding a 48 byte window over the file and computing the Rabin fingerprint of each window. When the low 13 bits of the fingerprint are zero LBFS calls those 48 bytes a breakpoint and ends the current block and begins a new one. Since the output of Rabin fingerprints are pseudo-random the probability of any given 48 bytes being a breakpoint is
Note that this is a problem similar to that faced by rsync.