The Basics of Cryptography

The base layer of crypto really is about cryptography, so it will be helpful to know a bit about it. A useful property in cryptographic function is that it be one way. This means it's easy to turn the input string into the output string but hard to do it in reverse. The classic example is that multiplying two large prime numbers is quite straightforward. Factoring an enormous number into two large primes is hard. Some forms of encoding are easy to apply and much more difficult to reverse. That makes them better for secret codes. Applying SHA-256 algorithm will create a 64-digit number for data of any size you can imagine.