CryptographyAdvanced

Collision resistance

The difficulty of finding two different inputs that produce the same cryptographic hash.

PLAIN-ENGLISH DEFINITION

In more detail

A fixed-length hash has fewer outputs than all possible inputs, so collisions must exist. Collision resistance means finding a useful pair should be computationally impractical. It matters when a hash commits to a document: an attacker should not be able to substitute different contents with a matching digest.

IN THE WILD

How you might use it

An attacker wants a harmless-looking file and an altered file to share one digest, so the altered version can pass the same hash check.

Collision resistance: two different input documents pass through matching hash modules and produce different fingerprint tiles, with many candidate pairs receding behind them.
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