A professional website will provide encryption by obtaining a certificate from a trusted authority–a third party, trusted to ensure that the encryption is on the level, private between the website and user, and not being spied on by any other party. Your bank, your email, even your Facebook account–all use encryption to keep the data you send them private. Let’s say you need to visit a website privately. If it matches the original hash, the input can be assumed to be the same, and you’ll be granted access to your data. Upon your return, when you type in your password, it is hashed again. When you create a password, your password input is hashed and stored by the server. This is how password storage usually works. Even small, random string of letters input into a hash function like SHA-1 will return a long, set number of characters, making it (potentially) impossible to revert the string of characters back to the original data. A “hash” is a unique code based on the input of any data. We won’t go deep into the math and computer science of any of the SHA functions, but here’s the basic idea. Common encryption methods SSL and TLS, which you might have heard of, can use a hash function like SHA-1 to create the signed certificates you see in your browser toolbar. Developed by the United States NSA, it’s a core component of many technologies used to encrypt important transmissions on the internet. The SHA in SHA-1 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm, and, simply put, you can think of it as a kind of math problem or method that scrambles the data that is put into it.
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