The threat abatement program manager tasked the software engineer with identifying the fastest implementation of a hash function to protect passwords with the least number of collisions. Which of…

Although the expression shown is textually identical to C, this is a duplicate distractor in a poorly formatted question; the intended unique wrong answers are B and D, not A.

MD5 is a cryptographically broken algorithm with publicly known and practical collision attacks, making it entirely unsuitable for password protection regardless of salt usage.

SHA-512 produces a 512-bit hash digest, giving it the largest output space and lowest theoretical collision probability of all options listed. Concatenating a unique salt before hashing prevents rainbow table and dictionary attacks by making each hash unique even for identical plaintext passwords. Among the available choices, SHA-512 with salt offers the strongest cryptographic security for password storage.

SHA-1 has been formally deprecated by NIST due to demonstrated collision vulnerabilities, and is no longer considered secure for cryptographic password hashing even when salted.