October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
454 pages
14h 44m
English
Encryption provides a way to ensure that only authorized people can see your data. It does so by disguising sensitive data. In some cases, however, you may not be interested in disguising data, but simply in protecting it from manipulation. Suppose that you have stored payment information for vendors. That data by itself may not be sensitive enough to require encryption, but you may want a way to ensure that someone does not alter the numbers to increase a payment amount. How can you do that? The answer lies in a process known as cryptographic hashing . Let’s start by looking at a real-world example.