Recent Posts

Encryption vs Encoding vs Hashing They might appear in the same context, but they are vastly different

Encryption is about keeping a secret and being able to restore it. Hashing is about fingerprinting — you don’t need to restore the original, but you need to make sure it is identical. Encoding is about data representation to enable information exchange. Encoding does not involve keeping secrets. This was … Read More »

The 3 Applications of Hash Functions What they are, what the options are, and why they matter

Image by Martin Thoma Hash functions take arbitrary many bytes as input and produce a fixed-length string as output. The string typically looks completely random, but the same input always generates the same output. They also typically produce different outputs for different inputs, but more about that later. After reading … Read More »

How do hash functions work?

Everybody who has written a noticeable amount of Java code should know the method hashCode(). But most beginners have difficulties to understand the significance of this little method. The following article gives you one small example with some impressions how much hash functions influence execution time. Connect four Connect Four … Read More »

MD5 cracking

MD5 is a cryptographic hash function. This means, you can give the MD5 algorithm a string and it will return another 32-character long alphanumeric string. The returned string looks quite random, but it isn't. If you use the same input, you always get the same 32 character output. What is … Read More »