How to perform sha256 decrypt?

1.2K    Asked by AlisonKelly in SQL Server , Asked on Nov 15, 2022

 From many forums I saw that the SHA256 data cannot be decrypted? If that's really true then how is the data verified? What's the use of just encrypting the data? The same question goes for the digital signatures (which I believe is the hashed value and private key)? The significance of SHA256 is that SHA-256 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit and it's used for cryptographic security. Cryptographic hash algorithms produce irreversible and unique hashes. The larger the number of possible hashes, the smaller the chance that two values will create the same hash.

Answered by Ranjana Admin

For sha256 decrypt, you must understand that it is not an encryption function but a hash function. The fundamental difference is that while encryption is a two way function (given the key) hash is only a one way function: given some data you can compute the hash, given the hash it is difficult (and mathematically impossible) to have the data back.




I said it is mathematically impossible to find the data from the hash because typically a hash function has a small codomain (for example 256bit for SHA256) but a big domain (you can hash any string), so there will be collisions: different strings with the same hash. For this reason if your password is saved in a hashed form then there exists an infinite password (but they can be very long) that unlocks your account. The good news is that collisions are rare when you use cryptographic hash functions, so your account is still safe.

Answering the fist part of your question, data verification is easy: if Alice sends to Bob a file with the hash checksum Bob can easily compute the hash of the file he has received and compare it with the hash received from Alice. This is usually enough to find out if there has been any error during the transmission (so the file is corrupt), but isn't enough if the transmission has been altered by some attacker that also altered the hash. So Alice and Bob need a secure channel to transmit the hash (for example a https page with a valid certificate) or they need to sign the hash in some way.

So we move to the answer to your second question: Alice can sign the hash using her private key before sending it to Bob, in this way an attacker can't tamper with it without invalidating the signature. Now you could ask why Alice signs with her RSA (or similar) key only the hash and not all the message, this is because computing RSA is slower than computing a hash (so she has to do the slow thing only on a small string: the hash). This was true especially when PGP was created and computers were slower.



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