In the realm of computer science, it’s hard to go too far without encountering hashing or hash functions. The concept appears throughout security, from encryption to password storage to crypt… ...

See RSA and hashing. One-Way Processing Also called a "one-way hash function" because it is nearly impossible to turn the digest back into the original data.

And modern hashing techniques like bcrypt and Argon2 don't simply run a password through a function like SHA1, but do so thousands of times, rehashing the resulting data again and again.

Hashing is a one-way cryptographic function while encryption is designed to work both ways. Encryption algorithms take input and a secret key and generate a random looking output called a ciphertext.

Breaking a hash function means showing that either — or both — of those properties aren’t true. Cryptanalysis of the MD4 family of hash functions has proceeded in fits and starts over the ...

The idea of standardizing a new hash function came in 2006, when it seemed like the SHA-2 family of functions wouldn’t be secure for much longer because of new types of cryptanalysis, Schneier said.

Learn More. Security researchers at Google and the CWI Institute in Amsterdam have found a way to crack the Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) cryptographic function.