Hashing Algorithm Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Hashing Algorithm - Research Paper Example In fact, any value or even a single letter is changed in the input; then the values of hash value will also be changed. Additionally, same hash value can be used in calculation in order to find two different inputs; for that reason the hashing algorithms are used to determine the reliability and effectiveness of data (comprising digital signatures, authentication and so on). In some cases, these hash values are also acknowledged as a "message digest". In the past few years, the use of hashing algorithms in every walk of science has increased to massive extent. In fact, hashing algorithms are believed to be the most important technique in data structures and randomized algorithms, within a wide variety of applications and fields like that complexity theory, information retrieval, data mining, parallel algorithms and cryptology (Ostlin & Pagh, 2003). However, hashing algorithms are extensively utilized in the field of information security (Yang, Li, Tan, Yan, & Hou, 2012). In the field of information security, hashing algorithms play a significant role in cryptography and are utilized to achieve numerous security goals. For instance, these algorithms are extensively used to attain reliability and validity, authenticating users of computer systems, implementing efficient digital signatures, putting into practice pseudo random number generators, implementing digital time stamping, creating session keys and sometime for building block ciphers as well. In the history of hashing algorithms a large number of hash functions were created as well as the majority of them were effectively broken and some were to some extent breached, along with it a number of theoretical threats were as well propose (Sobti, Geetha, & Anand, 2012; Algredo-Badillo, Morales-Sandoval, Feregrino-Uribe, & Cumplido, 2012). This paper presents a detailed analysis of hashing algorithms. This paper will discuss the uses and applications of hashing algorithms. This paper will focus on some of the impo rtant hashing algorithms such as digital signatures algorithms, cryptography algorithms and various other techniques. Hashing Algorithms Basically, the process of hashing simplifies the search process by making use of computationally a few operations as compared to any other sequential basic search algorithm. In this scenario, a hash function is a mathematical process in which a number is mapped to a large value range into an additional number with a smaller range. Figure1 demonstrates the process of hashing in the detail. In this diagram, a database that consists of eight specified records (such as addresses in one application) are to be matched in opposition to any received record. In view of the fact that each record contains a huge amount of data as well as the entire database contains a large number of records under actual circumstances, in this scenario scanning all the records and searching through the complete database individually can be unfeasible. However, this problem co uld be resolved if a piece of the record (or on the whole) is chosen and a key is assigned to the target value (normally, this target value is based on a 3-bit value as demonstrated in the figure1) by making use of the hash function (operator). As shown in the figure1, this process has divided a complete database of eight records into smaller groups of records in accordance with their matching hash outputs. In addition, this searching process will be applied to all the searches, in which this