Cryptographic hash function
special class of hash function that has certain properties which make it suitable for use in cryptography / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an input (or 'message') and returns a fixed-size string of bytes. The string is called the 'hash value', 'message digest', 'digital fingerprint', 'digest' or 'checksum'.
The ideal hash function has three main properties:
- It is extremely easy to calculate a hash for any given data.
- It is extremely computationally difficult to calculate an alphanumeric text that has a given hash.
- It is extremely unlikely that two slightly different messages will have the same hash.