Your organization's security baseline states that every integrity checksum must offer at least 128-bit collision resistance, but disk space on embedded appliances is limited. You may only choose algorithms in the SHA-2 family that are available through the standard sum utilities on nearly all Linux distributions. Which algorithm provides the minimum digest size that still satisfies the policy?
A hash function's collision resistance is roughly half of its digest length because of the birthday bound. SHA-256 outputs 256 bits, so its collision strength is 128 bits-just meeting the requirement. SHA-1's 160-bit digest yields only about 80-bit collision resistance and is no longer considered secure. SHA-224 produces a 224-bit digest, giving 112-bit collision resistance, which falls short of the policy. SHA-384 delivers 192-bit collision resistance but stores more data than needed. Therefore, SHA-256 is the smallest SHA-2 variant that meets the 128-bit collision-resistance threshold while remaining universally available as the sha256sum utility.
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What is collision resistance in hashing algorithms?
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CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8)
Security
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