Cryptographic hash function

A cryptographic hash function is a special class of hash function that has certain properties which make it suitable for use in cryptography. It is a mathematical algorithm that maps data of arbitrary size to a bit string of a fixed size (a hash function) which is designed to also be a one-way function, that is, a function which is infeasible to invert. The only way to recreate the input data from an ideal cryptographic hash function's output is to attempt a brute-force search of possible inputs to see if they produce a match, or use a "rainbow table" of matched hashes. Bruce Schneier has called one-way hash functions "the workhorses of modern cryptography". The input data is often called the message, and the output (the hash value or hash) is often called the message digest or simply the digest.

The ideal cryptographic hash function has five main properties:

Cryptographic hash functions have many information-security applications, notably in digital signatures, message authentication codes (MACs), and other forms of authentication. They can also be used as ordinary hash functions, to index data in hash tables, for fingerprinting, to detect duplicate data or uniquely identify files, and as checksums to detect accidental data corruption. Indeed, in information-security contexts, cryptographic hash values are sometimes called (digital) fingerprints, checksums, or just hash values, even though all these terms stand for more general functions with rather different properties and purposes.

Most cryptographic hash functions are designed to take a string of any length as input and produce a fixed-length hash value.

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