312-50V11 · Question #754
What is a "Collision attack" in cryptography?
The correct answer is D. Collision attacks try to find two inputs producing the same hash. A collision attack finds two distinct inputs that produce the same hash output, breaking the collision-resistance property of a hash function.
Question
What is a "Collision attack" in cryptography?
Options
- ACollision attacks try to get the public key
- BCollision attacks try to break the hash into three parts to get the plaintext value
- CCollision attacks try to break the hash into two parts, with the same bytes in each part to get the
- DCollision attacks try to find two inputs producing the same hash
How the community answered
(27 responses)- B4% (1)
- C4% (1)
- D93% (25)
Why each option
A collision attack finds two distinct inputs that produce the same hash output, breaking the collision-resistance property of a hash function.
Recovering a public key is an attack against asymmetric encryption systems, not hash functions, and is an unrelated cryptographic goal.
Splitting a hash into three parts is not a recognized attack methodology in cryptography and does not describe any known hash attack technique.
Splitting the hash output into two equal byte segments is not a collision attack - the attack involves finding two independent input messages, not manipulating the hash output itself.
Hash functions are designed to be collision-resistant, meaning it should be computationally infeasible to find two different messages M1 and M2 such that H(M1) equals H(M2). A successful collision attack defeats this property, undermining the integrity guarantees of digital signatures and certificate validation. Notable examples include MD5 and SHA-1, which have been broken via collision attacks.
Concept tested: Hash function collision resistance in cryptography
Source: https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/collision_attack
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