What is a birthday attack?

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What is a birthday attack?

A birthday attack is a type of cryptographic attack that exploits the birthday paradox, which states that in a group of just 23 people, there is a 50% chance that two people will have the same birthday. In the context of cryptography, a birthday attack takes advantage of this probability to find a collision in a hash function. It involves finding two different inputs that produce the same hash value, allowing an attacker to potentially forge digital signatures or break other cryptographic protocols.