Cryptography
A birthday attack is a cryptographic method used to find collisions in hash functions, exploiting the mathematics of probability. This technique is based on the birthday paradox, which suggests that in a set of randomly chosen people, the probability of two individuals sharing a birthday is surprisingly high. In the context of block ciphers and modes of operation, it can be leveraged to undermine the security of hash-based signatures and authentication mechanisms, emphasizing the importance of using sufficiently large hash sizes to minimize vulnerability.
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