What Is the “Birthday Paradox” and How Does It Relate to Collision Attacks?
The Birthday Paradox is the counter-intuitive probability that in a relatively small group of people, two will share the same birthday. In cryptography, it shows that a collision in an n-bit hash function can be found with a probability of 50% after only 2^(n/2) attempts, not 2^n.
This drastically reduces the computational effort required for a collision attack, making it the theoretical benchmark for the strength of collision resistance.
Glossar
Preimage Attack
Exploitation ⎊ A preimage attack, within cryptocurrency and financial derivatives, targets the cryptographic hash functions securing blockchain transactions and digital signatures.
N-Bit Hash
Dimension ⎊ An N-Bit Hash refers to the fixed-length output, or digest, produced by a cryptographic hash function, where N specifies the number of bits in that output string.
Birthday Paradox
Collision ⎊ The Birthday Paradox, within cryptocurrency and derivatives, describes the surprisingly high probability of hash collisions occurring within a defined dataset ⎊ specifically, the likelihood that two distinct inputs will produce the same cryptographic hash output.
Collision Attack
Vulnerability ⎊ A specific type of cryptographic flaw occurs when two distinct inputs produce the same output from a mathematical function.
The Birthday Paradox
Concept ⎊ The Birthday Paradox is a counter-intuitive mathematical probability concept stating that in a random set of items, the probability of finding a match between any two items becomes surprisingly high with a relatively small sample size.