Hashing

Hashing is a process that transforms data into a fixed-length string of characters, called a hash, using a specific algorithm. Think of it as a digital fingerprint unique to the original data. It’s commonly used to verify data integrity, securely store passwords, or quickly find information in databases. Because even small changes to the original data produce a different hash, hashes help detect tampering or corruption. Importantly, hashing is designed to be a one-way process—easy to generate a hash from data, but difficult to reverse-engineer the original data from the hash.