During a software development project review, the cryptographic engineer advises the project manager that security can be greatly improved by significantly slowing down the runtime of a hashing…

Question

Options

• AMonoalphabetic cipher
• BConfusion
• CRoot of trust
• DKey stretching
• EDiffusion

• A
  15% (4)
• B
  8% (2)
• C
  4% (1)
• D
  73% (19)

Explanation

Key stretching (D) is the process of taking a password or key and deliberately making it more computationally expensive to derive the final hash by running the hashing function through many iterations-often re-feeding the output along with the original input and salt at each round. Algorithms like PBKDF2, bcrypt, and scrypt implement key stretching. The goal is to make brute-force and dictionary attacks impractically slow even for attackers with powerful hardware. Monoalphabetic cipher (A) is a simple substitution cipher with no relevance to hashing. Confusion (B) is a cryptographic property describing how the output obscures the relationship to the key. Root of trust (C) refers to a hardware or firmware anchor for a chain of trust. Diffusion (E) describes how plaintext changes spread throughout ciphertext. None of B, C, or E describes iterative hash computation for password hardening.

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