Hash Collision Attacks: How They Work and Why SHA-1 Was Broken
What a hash collision is, how the SHAttered attack broke SHA-1, and why SHA-256 remains collision-resistant today.
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Tags: security, cryptography, attacks
Hash Collision Attacks: What They Are and Why They Matter A hash collision is when two different inputs produce the same hash output. Collision resistance — the property that makes finding such collisions infeasible — is one of the three core security properties of cryptographic hash functions. When it breaks, the consequences ripple through every system that relied on it. The Birthday Paradox: Why Collisions Are Easier Than You Think The birthday paradox states that in a group of just 23 people, there's a greater than 50% chance that two people share a birthday — despite there being 365 possible birthdays. The intuition-defying result comes from the fact that you're comparing every pair, not each person against a specific birthday. The same math applies to hash collisions. For an n-bit…
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