Dumb question: isn’t it irrelevant for the malicous party if it’s 78 or 87 per your example, because the login only checks the hash anyway? Won’t both numbers succesfully login?
It’s actually a really good question. What you’re explaining is called a collision, by creating the same hash with different numbers you can succesfully login.
This why some standard hashing function become deprecated and are replaced when someone finds a collision. MD5, which was used a lot to hash passwords or files, is considered insecure because of all the collisions people could find.
Dumb question: isn’t it irrelevant for the malicous party if it’s 78 or 87 per your example, because the login only checks the hash anyway? Won’t both numbers succesfully login?
It’s actually a really good question. What you’re explaining is called a collision, by creating the same hash with different numbers you can succesfully login.
This why some standard hashing function become deprecated and are replaced when someone finds a collision. MD5, which was used a lot to hash passwords or files, is considered insecure because of all the collisions people could find.