Birthday Attack and Hash Collisions - Quant Trader Interview Question
Difficulty: Medium
Category: Probability & Statistics
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Topics: probability, hashing, birthday-problem, estimation
Problem Description
You are evaluating the security of a new trading system that uses a hash function to generate unique identifiers for orders. The hash function outputs $n$ bits. Approximately how many hashes must you compute to have a 50% probability of finding a collision (i.e., two different orders with the same hash)?
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