Question: What is the difference between hashing and encryption?
Answer:
Encryption is a scheme where an intelligible text (plaintext in crypto terms) is made unintelligible (ciphertext in crypto terms) using a secure key. Block and stream ciphers and public key systems do this work. The security of the ciphers reside in the key length and decryption process is a difficult without proper knowledge of the key. But in hashing‚ they are one-way functions that compress arbitrary length strings into fixed short strings (message digests). Hash Functions can be designed using block ciphers using a secret key as a parameter along with the message that has to be hashed or with out them (dedicated hash functions MD4‚MD5‚SHA-1 etc..).
Encryption is a scheme where an intelligible text (plaintext in crypto terms) is made unintelligible (ciphertext in crypto terms) using a secure key. Block and stream ciphers and public key systems do this work. The security of the ciphers reside in the key length and decryption process is a difficult without proper knowledge of the key. But in hashing‚ they are one-way functions that compress arbitrary length strings into fixed short strings (message digests). Hash Functions can be designed using block ciphers using a secret key as a parameter along with the message that has to be hashed or with out them (dedicated hash functions MD4‚MD5‚SHA-1 etc..).
