What do most attacks on hash functions involve?
A. Finding Collisions
B. Pre-generating millions of hashes and comparing them to the plain text that generates it.
C. Really good random guessing.
(2 points)
O Aand B
O Aand C
O Band C
A. Finding Collisions
The correct answer is: A. Finding Collisions
The correct answer is A. Finding Collisions.
Most attacks on hash functions involve finding collisions. A collision occurs when two different inputs can produce the same hash value. This means that two different plain texts can have the same hash, which is undesirable for a secure hash function.
To find collisions, attackers usually employ techniques such as differential cryptanalysis, birthday attacks, or brute-force methods. These attacks involve systematically searching for two different inputs that produce the same hash value.
Option B, pre-generating millions of hashes and comparing them to the plain text that generates it, is not a common attack on hash functions. It is inefficient and impractical to generate a large number of hashes and then compare each one to the original plain text.
Option C, really good random guessing, is not a feasible attack on hash functions. Hash functions are designed to be computationally difficult to reverse engineer or guess the original input from the output. Random guessing is highly unlikely to yield any meaningful result.
Therefore, the correct answer is A. Finding Collisions.