Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In cryptography, a preimage attack on a cryptographic hash is an attempt to find a message that has a specific hash value. Some significant preimaging attacks have already been discovered, but they are not yet practical. If a practical preimaging attack is discovered, it would dras ...Full description
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In cryptography, a preimage attack on a cryptographic hash is an attempt to find a message that has a specific hash value. Some significant preimaging attacks have already been discovered, but they are not yet practical. If a practical preimaging attack is discovered, it would drastically affect many Internet protocols. In this case, "practical" means that it could be executed by an attacker in a meaningful amount of time for a meaningful amount of money. A preimaging attack that costs trillions of dollars and takes decades to preimage one desired hash value or one message is not practical; one that costs a few thousand dollars and takes a few weeks might be very practical.