- A hashing algorithm is used to map data of arbitrary size to a fixed-size have value (or digest).
- A cryptographic hash function is a specific type of hash function:
- that is designed to have certain security properties:
- it should be computationally infeasible to find collisions (two different inputs that produce the same hash output) and that
- the output appears random and unpredictable.
- a hash function that does not have these qualities is not considered cryptographically secure.