Hash tables become quite inefficient when there are many collisions. While extremely uneven hash distributions are extremely unlikely to arise by chance, a malicious adversary with knowledge of the hash function may be able to supply information to a hash which creates worst-case behavior by causing excessive collisions, resulting in very poor performance (i.e., a denial of service attack). In critical applications, either universal hashing can be used or a data structure with better worst-case guarantees may be preferable