NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Collision attack

A collision attack on a cryptographic hash tries to find two different inputs that will produce the same hash value, i.e. a hash collision. Unlike a hash collision, a collision attack normally aims to find an alternate input that still makes sense, rather than a just a nonsense input.

Categories: Cryptography stubs | Cryptographic attacks

Results from FactBites:

Cryptography Research - Hash Collision Q&A (1054 words)
	In contrast, a collision attack finds two messages with the same hash, but the attacker can't pick what the hash will be.
	The attacks announced at CRYPTO 2004 are collision attacks, not preimage attacks.
	For example, a devastating attack would be one that enabled adversaries to obtain a legitimate server certificate with a collision to one containing a wildcard for the domain name and an expiration date far in the future.

Cryptanalysis: Collision attack in Hashing : Palisade (581 words)
	In a preimage attack, an attacker tries to guess the input message from which a hash function produces a particular output.
	In a collision attack an attacker finds two messages with the same hashed output and sends the incorrect one to the receiver.
	According to the research carried out by these scientists collision attack on SHA-1 requires an estimated work factor of 2(power)69 (approximately 590 billion) hash computations and it is way beyond the capacity of a normal computer.

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