https://www.compilemymind.com/tags/hashing/ Recent content in Hashing on Compile My Mind Hugo en Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:31:07 +0300 https://www.compilemymind.com/posts/encryption-vs-hashing-vs-encoding/ Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:31:07 +0300 https://www.compilemymind.com/posts/encryption-vs-hashing-vs-encoding/ <p>A developer opens a support ticket and finds an API credential that looks like this:</p> <div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code class="language-text" data-lang="text"><span class="line"><span class="cl">c2VjcmV0LWtleS0xMjM= </span></span></code></pre></div><p>It looks scrambled, so someone calls it encrypted. A few seconds later, another person decodes it as Base64 and reads <code>secret-key-123</code>.</p> <p>Nothing was cracked. There was no key to steal and no cryptographic weakness to exploit. The data was merely written in a different alphabet.</p> <p>That small vocabulary mistake points to a much larger engineering problem. Encryption, hashing, and encoding can all turn readable input into output that looks meaningless, but appearance is where the similarity ends. They make different promises, solve different problems, and fail in different ways.</p>