Hash Functions
I found a clear definition of the hash functions thought I should bring it here on my blog. Hash Functions They provide a mapping between an arbitrary length input, and a (usually) fixed length (or smaller length) output. It can be anything from a simple crc32, to a full blown cryptographic hash function such as MD5 or SHA1/2/256/512. The point is that there's a one-way mapping going on. It's always a many:1 mapping (meaning there will always be collisions) since every function produces a smaller output than it's capable of inputting (If you feed every possible 1mb file into MD5, you'll get a ton of collisions). The reason they are hard (or impossible in practicality) to reverse is because of how they work internally. Most cryptographic hash functions iterate over the input set many times to produce the output. So if we look at each fixed length chunk of input (which is algorithm dependent), the hash function will call that the current state. It will then iterat