What is the Difference between Hashing and Encryption?
Hashing, encryption these
words seem more complex and challenging to understand even when we heard them,
right?
But don’t worry; there
is nothing complicated or complex about them. Hashing and encryption are simply
techniques to hide the data from a third party when we are sending it over the
network.
So you must be a thing
if both perform the same function why we need them both? But here comes a
tricky part even both techniques do the same function more or less, the usage
for each technique is different.
Let’s first look at the hashing
and what it does?
The hashing technique
has three parts the data or we can say input, hash function, or an algorithm
for data conversion and output or the data we get after processing with the
algorithm.
So what hashing does is,
it converts large data files into a small one. So again, the question comes it
similar to compression of data? The answer is no. Compression is reversible;
hashing is not.
Once the data is
converted it is very difficult to reverse the process.
Let’s take an example.
You are the General in
Military and you get the information through your spy network that your enemy
is coming back to your base in a few hours so you must relocate your position
with all the important data.
Now, what will you do?
How can you transfer such sensitive data you have collected and stored so far
with an open network with just a few hours left? And that’s where hashing comes
to play.
In this situation, you
put your data into a hashing algorithm and send it to the command base so even
if the enemy somehow gets hold of your data all they can see is just numbers
and letters. And your data transformation also becomes very fast and also
required less space to store the data in the command base.
So the advantages of
hashing are transferring data becomes fast and required less space as the data
is now converted into numbers.
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