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Originally Posted by Mutt
thanks for the explanations - makes some sense now.
would help if i knew what 'hashing' is exactly since the term is used so much.
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hashing is a one way encoding, there are various hashing techniques in existence such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and tons of others. here's a simple example of using hash: suppose there is a site with sign up form where user password is collected and stored, storing passwords in open text is not a good way of doing it, you would apply some one way encoding function using some made up or generated key and storing this hash value in the database, this way unless you have exact password value and exact key the hash value most likely won't be the same (there are possibilities of collisions when different values may produce same result, example: 2+2=4 & 3+1=4 although odds are nano-tiny of that ever happening). with such system when user signs in same encoding operation is perfomed and compared against password hash value in the database. when user forgets his/her password you email newly generated password and store new hash value in db, and user later can change to anything he likes. sha-256 practically impossible to brute-force today with modern computers and supercomputers.