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It’s My Birthday 🎉
I came across a fascinating problem in my probability theory class when I was receiving my degree in Mathematics. The Birthday Paradox is a problem from which we calculate the probability that two (one pair) of n people in a room have the same birthday. I was quite surprised by the results:
The numbers seem quite unintuative, however they do check out. The theorem states that out of 23 people in a room, the probability that two people have the same birthday is 50.7%. This is assuming a uniform distribution of birthdays, which isn’t likely- but only marginally sways our results. This means a great deal to the cyber-hacking community.
The backend of many password fields use a mathematic scheme called digital signatures. When we enter a password on a site, one would think that it is sent to the server and cross-analyzed with their database to see if the passwords match. This would make your passwords suseptable to man-in-the-middle attacks. In many cases, that’s not what happens. Some sites use SHA-1 encryption. It’s a system for encrypting the password into a bunch of random numbers and letters of a fixed length. The password the user types on their computer…
