What is a hashing function?

Technology CommunityCategory: BlockchainWhat is a hashing function?
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago

hashing function is a one way (non invertible function) that maps a set of inputs to a set of outputs:

hash(s) -> p,

where for our purposes s and p are both strings. For any string s we can find the hash by applying our hashing function, which will return a new string. This is a deterministic procedure in that given an s, the same hash() will produce the same p. There is no inverse of the hash operation, so you cannot go from output to input:

hash^-1(p) -> s.

It is also used to verify the integrity of data.