Birthday Attack: A type of cryptographic attack that exploits the mathematics behind the birthday problem in probability theory. It takes advantage of the fact that in a set of randomly chosen people, there’s a high probability that two of them will share the same birthday. Similarly, in cryptography, the attack uses this principle to find collisions in hash functions, which occur when two different inputs produce the same hash output. This can compromise cryptographic systems that rely on the uniqueness of hash values. The attacker generates multiple variants of input data and computes their hash values until a collision is found. This is significantly faster than a brute force search for two inputs with the same hash value due to the birthday paradox’s counterintuitive probability curves. It’s particularly a concern for digital signatures and data integrity checks that rely on hashing algorithms.