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Comment by moralestapia

13 days ago

What?

Hashing is not encrypting.

You can learn more about the topic here, https://www.okta.com/identity-101/hashing-vs-encryption/

7 comments

moralestapia

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sowbug  13 days ago

> What?

> Hashing is not encrypting.

> You can learn more about the topic here, https://www.okta.com/identity-101/hashing-vs-encryption/

Thank you for that link. Your original comment implied that Signal's threat model should have included an attacker-controlled end. The only way to do that is to make decryption impossible by anyone, including the intended recipient. A labyrinthine way to do that would be to substitute the symmetric-encryption algorithm with a hash algorithm, which of course destroys the plaintext, but does accomplish the goal of obfuscating it in transit, at rest, and forever.

p-o  13 days ago

Hashing is a part of encryption, maybe you are the one who needs to shore up on the topic?

  • aipatselarom  13 days ago

    Nice try. However, hashing and encryption are two different operations.

    Load this page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

    Ctrl-F "hash". No mention of it.

    Before being pedantic at least check out the url in that comment to get the basics going.

    • sowbug  13 days ago

      This entire thread should be annihilated, but since you mentioned being pedantic...

      You're correct that a pure encryption algorithm doesn't use hashing. But real-world encryption systems will include an HMAC to detect whether messages were altered in transit. HMACs do use hash functions.