Collision Attack


A collision, in cryptography, is the act of two different plaintext inputs producing the same exact ciphertext output.

 A collision attack exploits collisions to forge a digital signature.

  • used to
    • forge a digital certificate to spoof a trusted website
    • make it appear that trojan malware derived from trusted publisher

How it Works

  1. attacker creates a malicious document and a benign document that produce the same hash value
    • attacker submits the benign document for signing by the target
  2. attacker removes the signature from the benign document and adds it to the malicious document, forging the target’s signature