An algorithm that transforms a given amount of data (the "message") into a fixed number of digits, known as the "hash," "digest" or "digital fingerprint." Hash functions are a fundamental component in ...

Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and ...

Conceived by the enigmatic figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin represents a monumental technological breakthrough, introducing the world to a decentralized cryptocurrency that operates ...

In this episode of “Bitcoin, Explained,” hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost go back to Bitcoin basics. They explain one of the most fundamental building blocks in all of Bitcoin: hash functions ...

Imagine taking a block of data and turning it into a unique string of characters. Like giving it a digital nickname that never changes (unless the data does!). That’s a hash. Whether the original data ...

Understanding Bitcoin is a one-way hash function should make sense because a hash function cannot be reversed. Once you understand that, it is hard to go back to thinking otherwise. The secure hash ...

You can’t un-ring a bell, but you might be able to un-hash an email, depending on whom you ask. In order for marketers to safely use hashes for targeted advertising, they must stay abreast of the ...

For more than six years, the SHA1 cryptographic hash function underpinning Internet security has been at death’s door. Now it’s officially dead, thanks to the submission of the first known instance of ...

Security researchers have achieved the first real-world collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function, producing two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 signature. This shows that the algorithm ...