Hashing

Abstract

For computer engineers, data such as text documents, music files and video files are just series of bits, being either zero or one. Such sequences can be mixed, merged and compressed into bit sequences of fixed length, and we say that the bit sequence is hashed. Hashing algorithms map files of different lengths onto bit sequences of the same length, and they can help to identify original files. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.