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…

A monoalphabetic cipher is a classical substitution cipher that replaces each letter with another fixed letter, which is entirely unrelated to hashing or password storage.

Confusion is a cryptographic design principle that obscures the relationship between plaintext and ciphertext, typically achieved through substitution in block ciphers, not iterative hashing.

Root of trust refers to a trusted hardware or software component that serves as the foundation for a system's security chain, not a hashing technique.

Key stretching techniques such as PBKDF2, bcrypt, and scrypt increase the time and resources required to compute a hash by running the underlying algorithm through thousands or millions of iterations, each using the input and salt from the previous round. This dramatically raises the cost of brute-force and dictionary attacks because an attacker must repeat the full iteration chain for every candidate password. The added salt per iteration also increases entropy and prevents precomputed rainbow table attacks.

Diffusion is a cryptographic principle that spreads the influence of a single plaintext bit across many ciphertext bits to obscure statistical patterns, which is a property of cipher design rather than iterative hashing.