Birthday Attack
A birthday attack is a type of cyber attack that takes advantage of the probability of two people having the same birthday to break into a computer system.
Imagine you have a group of 23 people. The chance that two people in that group have the same birthday is around 50%. If you increase the group to 70 people, the chance of two people having the same birthday goes up to 99.9%.
Now, let’s bring this back to computer security. In a computer system, there are lots of different codes and hashes that are used to keep things secure. A hacker can use a birthday attack to try to create a collision, which is when two different pieces of information produce the same hash value. If the hacker can create a collision, it means they can bypass the security measures and gain access to the system.
To protect against birthday attacks, computer security experts often use longer hash values or salts, which are random bits of data added to the original data before hashing. This makes it much more difficult for a hacker to create a collision and break into the system.
So, in short, a birthday attack is a type of cyber attack that takes advantage of the probability of two people having the same birthday to break into a computer system.