Cryptographic attacks
There are a variety of cryptographic attacks, and we will now look at these in turn; you need to know these thoroughly for the Security+ exam. We will start with the birthday attack and finish with key stretching:
- Birthday: The birthday paradox states that in a random gathering of 23 people, there is a 50% chance that two people will have the same birthday. If we store passwords as hashes, then all passwords that are the same will produce the same hash if we are using the same hashing algorithm. The birthday looks for collisions in hashes; if they find two hashes of the same value, the attacker also knows that the password is the same.
- Digital signatures: Digital signatures can be to a attack.
- Rainbow tables: Rainbow tables are lists of pre-computed passwords with the corresponding hash; you can obtain free rainbow tables from the internet. Some of the larger rainbow tables are 460 GB in size. These tables speed up the cracking of passwords that have been hashed.
- Collision...
