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Hash Values

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Hash Values

A hash value represents a numeric value of a length that is fixed and identifies data uniquely. These values tend to represent huge amounts of data with quite smaller numerical values, thus they get used with digital signatures. That is, it is a string value that is a result of calculating of a Hashing Algorithm (Dahlgaard, et.al, 2017). The main objective of any message digest function is facilitating the production of digests which act to seem rather unsystematic. To get well-thought-out to be protected cryptographically, the hash task ought to attain specific requirements:

i. It is difficult for attackers to come up with two messages which give a similar hash value.

ii. It is not possible for any attacker to create a message which matches a distinct hash assessment.

Some of the most essential Hashing Algorithms are:

i. SHA-1

The Secure Hash Algorithm is denoted as a cryptographic hash function that tends to take input as well as produces a 20 byte hash value that is referred to as message digest. The Secure Hash Algorithm gets used in numerous situations whereby there could be a potentially long message that requires get comparing or quickly processing (Guesmi, et.al, 2016).

ii. MD5 Algorithm

The MD5 got invented in 1992 by Ronald Rivest and was for the purpose of increasing the former MD4 design. It was created by taking a single string of whichever length and encoding it into a hash value that is a 128-bit. The MD5 algorithm is a single-way cryptographic task which receives a communication of whichever size as returns as well as inputs as they output a digest value of fixed length to get used for the verification of the initial communication. Most prevalent application of MD5 is the verification as well as the creation of digital structures (de Guzman, et.al, 2018).

The storage strategy of a password is quite crucial to help in the mitigation of data breaches which place the reputation of diverse organizations in danger. This being said, hashing is the basis of secure password storage. The Hash function is important when dealing with securing passwords because:

i. It is rather difficult for one to come up with an initial input that matches a particular anticipated output.

ii. It is practical and easy to compute the hash, but quite impossible or difficult for the re-generation of the original input if one only knows the hash value.

One of the major uses of hash values is determining the integrity of data, this can be downloads, attachments, email, folder and file. The most wonderful aspect about the Hash Value is that these values are highly unique; therefore, there are no two data could theoretically have the same Hash Value. The Hash functions seem to behave as a single way function by the use of mathematical operations which are extremely cumbersome and difficult to return back such as the modulo operator.

In addition, a hash value could get used be used either for security or accessing data. This message digest is a number which gets generated from several string of texts. In case they are similar, there is quite a high probable which the message got transmitted intact. Also, Hashing is a prevalent method of retrieving data records.

When it comes to misusing, there is a condition referred to as Collision in Hashing. This is a situation whereby two diverse Data have similar Hash Values. The most appropriate Hashing Algorithm is one which cannot result in Hash Value Collision.

Conclusion

From the above research, other that selecting a good hashing algorithm, one is expected to force their users to select a password that gets built up for at least a minimum of 8 random characters.

References

Dahlgaard, S., Knudsen, M., & Thorup, M. (2017). Practical hash functions for similarity estimation and dimensionality reduction. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 6615-6625).

de Guzman, L. B., Sison, A. M., & Medina, R. P. (2018, September). MD5 Secured Cryptographic Hash Value. InProceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence (pp. 54-59). ACM.

Guesmi, R., Farah, M. A. B., Kachouri, A., & Samet, M. (2016). A novel chaos-based image encryption using DNA sequence operation and Secure Hash Algorithm SHA-2. Nonlinear Dynamics, 83(3), 1123-1136.