This was done as an end of year maths project in which a poster and presentation had to be made. I ended up getting selected for the final for my presentation. Sadly I don’t have access to a video (I’m not even sure one was made) but I do have the slides to the presentation, which you can find here and the poster can be found here.

The project is on, as suggested by the title, the birthday paradox and its application to breaking cryptographic hash functions. I first explain, in high level terms, what a hash function is and give reasons why their properties are useful for encrypting data and give some examples of their use.

I then outline the types of attack that can be performed on hash function (preimage, second preimage and collision attacks) before finally getting onto the birthday problem.

At this point I derive a formula to approximate of the formula given a number of individuals that give us a certain probability.

Finally I explain how this is useful to breaking cryptographic hash functions and how it can be combatted against.

Quite a lot for an 8 minute presentation.