A method to protect data that converts data into a fixed-length message digest. Hashing is a one-way (mathematical) function in which a non-secret algorithm takes any arbitrary length message as input and produces a fixed length output (usually called a “hash code” or “message digest”). Hash functions are required to have the following properties:
- It is computationally infeasible to determine the original input given only the hash code,
- It is computationally infeasible to find two inputs that give the same hash code.
