What is the Difference between Hashing and Encryption?

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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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