Hashing Glossary

Browse 10 hashing terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

10 Hashing Terms

Bucket
A grouping container used to hold related items, often in hash tables, cloud object storage, or rate-limiting logic. The exact meaning depends on context, but...
Collision Resistance
A property of a cryptographic hash function meaning it should be computationally infeasible to find two different inputs that produce the same output. Strong...
Content Hash
A hash value derived from the actual bytes or text of some content, used to detect changes, ensure integrity, or produce stable cache-busting names. Content...
Cryptographic Hash
Cryptographic Hash is a one-way function that maps arbitrary input to a fixed-size digest used for integrity and indexing. Security teams use it to enforce...
File Hash
A digest value computed from a file's contents using a hashing algorithm such as SHA-256, used to identify files, detect changes, or compare against known-bad...
Key Derivation Function
A function that derives one or more cryptographic keys from a secret value (password, passphrase). Password-hashing KDFs (bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2) are...
MD5
MD5 is a legacy cryptographic hash function that is fast but broken for collision resistance and unsuitable for secure integrity checks. Security teams use it...
Message Digest
A fixed-length hash value computed from input data and used to detect changes, compare content, or support cryptographic protocols. The term appears both...
Password Salt
A unique random value added to a password before hashing so identical passwords do not produce identical stored hashes and precomputed cracking tables become...
Password Storage
The way a system stores password-related data, ideally using salted, memory-hard password hashing rather than reversible encryption or plaintext. Password...

Related Topics