Hashing: History, Types, Working & Uses of Hashing

Hashing is an essential tool in digital forensics and plays a crucial role in ensuring the integrity and authenticity of digital evidence. Digital evidence such as files, emails, and images, can be easily modified or tampered with, making it challenging to determine the original content of the evidence. Hashing helps investigators to verify whether the digital evidence has been altered or tampered with since it was originally collected.  What is Hashing? Hashing is a process of converting an input message or data of any length into a fixed-length output, also known as a hash value, using a mathematical algorithm. The resulting hash value is unique to the input data, and any slight modification of the input data will result in a completely different hash value. History of Hashing Hashing has been used in computer science and cryptography for several decades, and its origins can be traced back to the 1950s. […]

Hashing vs Encryption

In the context of securing the data, there are two most common techniques which play a major role – Hashing and Encryption. Both of these techniques can help in securing information, but each of these processes serves differently and operate in distinct ways. In this article, we will explore the topic of hashing vs encryption, their unique strengths and limitations, and the situations in which each may be the better option for data security. Hashing and Encryption Hashing involves converting a piece of data of any length into a fixed-length string of characters, known as a hash or message digest. The resulting hash is unique to the input data, which means that any changes made to the data will result in a completely different hash. Hashing is often used to verify the integrity of data by comparing the hash of the original data with the hash of the modified data […]