May 2001
Intermediate to advanced
618 pages
20h 50m
English
In this chapter, we’ve explored the message digest. The facility to calculate a message digest is straightforward and easy to use; the facility to write our own message digest class is equally straightforward.
The message digest by itself gives us some comfort about the state of the data it represents, but it does not give us a completely secure system. If we have a shared passphrase or secret key, we can construct a secure message digest (that is, a Message Authentication Code). A secure message digest is very similar to a digital signature, which we’ll explore in the next chapter.
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