Hashing

The art of generate a number that is unique, a.k.a., the Hash to the content of a stream of data. Another word for a Hash is a Checksum.

Hashing is an algorithm that can be used to calculate a number from a stream of data. If one would change even one bit, the algorithm would produce a different number. Another way to look at it is that Hashing is the ability to generate a fingerprint that is unique for every unique piece of data.

There is a number of Hashing Algorithms. The most common ones are:

• MD5
• SHA1
• SHA256
• SHA512