ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

The avalanche effect is the property of a well-designed cryptographic hash function whereby a small change to the input (even a single bit) produces a vastly different output hash. This dramatic change makes it trivial to recognize that the data has been altered, supporting reliable integrity verification of replicated snapshots.

Collision resistance and pre-image resistance are also essential qualities of secure hashes, but they address different threats: ensuring that two different inputs do not easily produce the same hash, and preventing an attacker from deriving the original input from the hash, respectively. Key stretching is a technique used to strengthen weak passwords by increasing computational workload; it is not an inherent property of hash functions themselves. Therefore, the avalanche effect is the most directly relevant characteristic for detecting bit-level corruption.