There are a variety of cryptographic attacks, and we will now look at these in turn. You need to thoroughly know these for the Security+ exam. We will start with the birthday attack and finish with key stretching:
- Birthday Attack: 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 use the same hashing algorithm. The birthday paradox looks for collisions in hashes; if it finds two hashes of the same value, the attacker also knows that the password is the same.
- Digital Signatures: Digital signatures are susceptible to a Birthday Attack.
- Rainbow Tables: Rainbow Tables are lists of pre-computed passwords with a corresponding hash; you can obtain free rainbow tables from the...