Hashing
A one-way function that produces a fixed-length digest from any input.
Hashing provides integrity (verifying data hasn’t changed) and underpins digital signatures, but it is one-way and gives no confidentiality. Use SHA-256 or stronger; MD5 and SHA-1 are broken by collision attacks. For password storage a plain hash is insufficient — combine a unique per-user salt with a deliberately slow key-derivation function such as bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 to defeat rainbow tables and brute force.
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