hash-attack-techniques

A playbook for studying weaknesses in cryptographic hash functions, which turn data into fixed-length values. It covers techniques such as length extension, collisions, timing attacks, birthday attacks, and proof-of-work solving.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it in capture-the-flag competitions and authorized security assessments to analyze or demonstrate hash-related weaknesses.
Why use it?
It helps choose an appropriate attack and avoid applying a technique to a hash design where it does not work, such as confusing HMAC with ordinary hashing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/miru-zero/zero-brain/hash-attack-techniques
Any agent
npx skills add miru-zero/zero-brain --skill hash-attack-techniques
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/miru-zero/zero-brain

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,983 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin 92% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00046 $0.03983
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01992
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00797
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00398

Measured 2d ago against content hash e27b215cb8be, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hash-attack-techniques scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

requests.get(url, params={**data, "mac": candidate})
Origin

This is a copy

92% identical to hash-attack-techniques — 6 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/hash-attack-techniques/SKILL.md · 490 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 490 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SKILL: Hash Attack Techniques — Expert Cryptanalysis Playbook

AI LOAD INSTRUCTION: Expert hash attack techniques for CTF and security assessments. Covers length extension attacks, MD5/SHA1 collision generation, meet-in-the-middle hash attacks, HMAC timing side channels, birthday attacks, and proof-of-work solving. Base models often incorrectly apply length extension to HMAC or SHA-3, or fail to distinguish between identical-prefix and chosen-prefix collisions.

Quick attack selection

Scenario Attack Tool
H(secret || msg) known, extend message Length extension HashPump, hash_extender
Need two files with same MD5 Identical-prefix collision fastcoll
Need specific MD5 prefix match Chosen-prefix collision hashclash
Byte-by-byte HMAC comparison Timing attack Custom script
Find any collision Birthday attack O(2^(n/2))
Proof of work: find hash with leading zeros Brute force hashcat, Python

1. LENGTH EXTENSION ATTACK

1.1 Vulnerable vs Non-Vulnerable

Hash Vulnerable Why
MD5 Yes Merkle-Damgard construction
SHA-1 Yes Merkle-Damgard construction
SHA-256 Yes Merkle-Damgard construction
SHA-512 Yes Merkle-Damgard construction
SHA-3 / Keccak No Sponge construction
HMAC-* No Double hashing prevents extension
SHA-256 truncated No (if truncated) Missing internal state bits
BLAKE2 No Different construction

1.2 Attack Mechanism

Given:   MAC = H(secret || original_message)
Known:   original_message, len(secret), MAC value
Compute: H(secret || original_message || padding || extension)
         WITHOUT knowing the secret!

How: The MAC value IS the internal hash state after processing
     (secret || original_message || padding).
     Initialize hash with this state, continue hashing extension.

Read the full file on GitHub · 490 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 490 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A e27b215cb8be

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hash-attack-techniques is a skill published in the GitHub repository miru-zero/zero-brain (0 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 3,983 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). It is 92% identical to hash-attack-techniques, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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