Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and ...

What are the differences between Message Authentication Codes (MAC) and Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication (HMAC)? Could you provide an example of an instance where one is a better option than ...

Hashing is a one-way cryptographic function while encryption is designed to work both ways. Encryption algorithms take input and a secret key and generate a random looking output called a ciphertext.

If you thought MD5 was banished from HTTPS encryption, you’d be wrong. It turns out the fatally weak cryptographic hash function, along with its only slightly stronger SHA1 cousin, are still widely ...

When data breaches went from being an occasional threat to a persistent fact of life during the early 2010s, one question would come up again and again as victim organizations, cybersecurity ...

Security researchers have achieved the first real-world collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function, producing two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 signature. This shows that the algorithm ...

Understanding Bitcoin is a one-way hash function should make sense because a hash function cannot be reversed. Once you understand that, it is hard to go back to thinking otherwise. The secure hash ...