Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook

Running popular cryptographic hash functions

A cryptographic hash function has specific properties that make it different from other hash functions. First of all, producing a possible input message from a given hash digest output should be intractable, meaning that it must take an exponentially long time to solve in practice.

For example, if a hash produces the digest 66fc01ae071363ceaa4178848c2f6224, then in principle, discovering the content used to generate a digest should be difficult.

In practice, some hash functions are easier to crack than others. For example, MD5 and SHA-1 are considered trivial to crack and should not be used, but are demonstrated later for completeness. More information about how MD5 and SHA-1 are insecure can be found ...