Questions tagged [birthday-attack]
A birthday attack is a cryptanalytic technique. Birthday attacks can be used to find collisions in a cryptographic hash function. For instance, suppose we have a hash function which, when supplied with a random input, returns one of $k$ equally likely values. By repeatedly evaluating the function on $1.2\sqrt{k}$ different inputs, it is likely we will find some pair of inputs that produce the same output (a collision).