Published in · 8 min read · Nov 2, 2022
--
Do you ever send files or data over the Internet that are confidential? Chances are, because we all send passport data, passwords or medical information from time to time. Often you want someone other than the intended recipient to be able to see this information. You can never be 100% sure of that, but there is a technique that can give you a hand.
Hashing algorithms can be used to send data securely. When you secure information with a hashing algorithm, you can assume that the data will reach the intended recipient unaltered.
Yet we see that very few people consciously use hashing. However, we often use hashing unconsciously. For example, when we send cryptocurrencies over the blockchain network. Therefore, let’s take a look at what hashing is, but especially what the most important and (in)secure hashing algorithms are.
A hashing algorithm is a technology that converts data to a cryptographic output. What this output looks like depends entirely on the content. When one bit of this content changes, the output already looks completely different. This makes it easy to tell if the content has changed in transit: if the hash looks different upon receipt than it did upon transmission, the data has been altered.
In data hashing, a string of any length is converted to a string of a fixed length. By a string, we mean a series of numbers/letters, which at first glance appear to be in a random order.
Yet the outcome is not at all as random as we might think. This is because there is an algorithm behind the hashing that takes care of the logic. We call this a hashing algorithm, of which there are an awful lot of different ones. For example, Bitcoin (BTC) uses the SHA-256 algorithm. Another well-known algorithm is MD5.
You could think of a hashing algorithm as a kind of machine for creating a secret code. Below you can see what such a hash looks like, where the SHA-256 hashing algorithm was used.
Examples:
Hello — 185f8db32271fe25f561a6fc938b2e264306ec304eda518007d1764826381969
