Friday, November 23, 2012

I'm developing a hash (encryption) called RMH (Remove/Mathematical Hash)

This is a new encryption (hash) created by yours truly. (Wondering what exactly is a hash, and what it can be used for? Scroll down!) Hashes such as MD5 and SHA1 do bitwise operations to create their hashes. SHA1 is 40 characters, while each character is 1 out of 16 options (0-9,a-f). This is 1640 (1.4615016e+48) possible permutations.
Enter RMH. RMH does mathematical and string operations on the entered text. Then it gives a 30 character long string, 0-9,a-z,A-Z (base 62). This is 6230 (5.9122213e+53) permutations! That's 5.9122067e+53 more than SHA1!

The RMH algorithm isn't stable enough yet to be used for real purposes, but my hopes are that it will be!

One plus bits have over strings is that the hash will also work on files.

What is a hash?

A hash is a non-reversible encryption. This means, it turns plain text into gibberish, and you should not be able to figure out the original text. This is different from encoding, where you are meant to reverse it.
What's the use of encrypting something so that it can never be read? To store passwords securely in a database, for one. Example:
Website A and website B each have a user account system. Website A hashes their users' passwords in the database, while B doesn't. Hackers steal both website's databases. Now, they can get at anyone's account on B, because the passwords are plain in there. But for A, they can't.
To log in the user, sites simply check the hashed input against the value in their database.

If you're hashing files, it's usually to create a digital signature. So, when you download a program, you can check the hash you get from it against the official hash, to make sure your program wasn't pirated.

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