Difficulty of finding an input string that hashes to a given value

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12
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2answers
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What is the general justification for the hardness of finding preimages for cryptographic hash functions?

Since most cryptographic hash functions are simple, compact constructions does this simplicity impose a limit on the complexity and the size of a function that can generate preimages? That is, given a ...
1
vote
3answers
304 views

reverse of md5sum

This might be out of ignorance, I apologize, but how complex of a problem might it be to generate a file of size N whose md5sum is X? For example, ...