Don’t get intimidated by the title of this chapter. The theory of cryptographic hash functions is not particularly abstruse. What is difficult is the construction of these functions from scratch. However, we need not concern ourselves with this aspect of the mathematical theory since most programming language libraries provide us with a good selection of functions to choose from.
Cryptographic hash functions are concerned with the very practical problem of determining whether a document or text string has been altered by some malicious actor. These ...
