Final answer:
The expected number of steps for a generic attack to find preimages for a hash function with n bits is 2^n, representing the exhaustive search through the hash function's output space for a preimage resistance check.
Step-by-step explanation:
The expected number of steps for a generic attack for finding preimages typically refers to a cryptographic hash function. For a good cryptographic hash function, the number of steps required to find a preimage (an original input given the hash output) should be approximately the same as the total number of possible outputs of the hash function, which is also known as its hash space. This concept is linked to the hash function's preimage resistance, which is one of the essential properties of secure hash functions.Specifically, in an ideal scenario, the expected number of steps for a brute-force preimage attack would be 2n, where n is the number of bits in the hash output. In other words, for a hash function that produces a 256-bit hash, an attacker would expect to try 2256 different inputs to find a preimage, because this would involve exhaustively searching through all possible inputs to find the one that maps to the given hash value.