From: Tim (ccie2be@nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Dec 31 2005 - 17:39:31 GMT-3
Hi guys,
Happy New Year.
I hope everybody a year from now can look back upon 2006 and say, "This was
truly a great year."
Anyway, I've been trying to figure out something that's been bothering me
about hashing. According to lots of sources, a hash function can take as
input an arbitrarily long message and generate a fixed length output which
seems to be 128 bits in length for most Hashing algorithms such as SHA-1,
MD5, etc. commonly used today.
My question is this:
Can someone explain in simple terms how that's done without using advanced
mathematics?
When you think about it, this is very cool. No matter what length the
original message is, the hash is 128 bits. If the message is 100 bytes, the
hash is 128 bits. But, if the message is 1,000,000 bytes, the hash is still
128 bits. How is that possible? I'm hoping someone can illustrate how
that's done with a simple example.
Ok, everyone have a good time this evening.
TIA, Tim
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