Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/17/07 10:14

damod.php wrote:

> What is MD5 its encryption algorithm...? am in php Mysql

No -- it's a hash algorithm. Hashing is a bit like encryption, except:

1. When you hash a really long string, you get back something
much shorter.

2. The conversion is one way only. You can't unhash.

Compare:

======================================================================
Garbles? Shrinks? Reversable? Example
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Encryption Yes No Yes GPG
Hashing Yes Yes No MD5, SHA1
Compression Yes Yes Yes ZIP, Gzip, Bzip2
Encoding Slightly No Yes htmlentitites()
======================================================================


--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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