collisions

That is still an attack on the second preimage or a collision resistance properties of the hash function. Most collisions do work this way, for example see [1]. [1] https://github.com/corkami/collisions

There's some theoretical background on how collision functions work. Generally, the assumption is that the hashing functions in cryptography meet the following: - Each input can be quickly converted to a digest (hash). - Getting from a digest to the input should be infeasible. - It should be infeasible to produce two inputs such that they map to the same digest (although strictly mathematically, people tend to prove it is inefficient to do so). and a few more assumptions that are irrelevant for your question. In a nutshell, the idea is that hashing functions are deterministic. One input maps to one output and by knowing the output I cannot find the input nor I can produce two inputs that map to the same output. Now, those attacks basically violate the principle that one input maps to one output. Suddenly, many inputs map to the same out

Ange Albertini's work on collisions is pretty great and he makes lots of example images and illustrations. https://corkami.github.io/ In particular he works on/with the PoC||GTFO team and is responsible for the MD5 collision cover art in a past issue: https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo For SHA-1 (and others) you might find more at his github project: https://github.com/corkami/collisions hth, adric

@angealbertini does a lot of cool work in this area. Check out this repo with examples of hash collisions for PDF, MP4, PNG, GIF, etc. https://github.com/corkami/collisions