by Peter Girard (1 Submission)
Category: Miscellaneous
Compatability: Visual Basic 3.0
Difficulty: Intermediate
Date Added: Wed 3rd February 2021
Rating:
(7 Votes)
The function SecureHash generates a 160-bit (20-hex-digit) message digest for a given message (String) of any length. The digest is unique to the message. It is not possible to recover the message from the digest. The only way to find the source message for a digest is by the brute force hashing of all possible messages and comparison of their digests. For a complete description see FIPS Publication 180-1:
https://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm (HTML version)
https://csrc.nist.gov/fips/fip180-1.txt (plain text version)
I wrote this a few months ago, prior to recent VBC submissions describing how to use Internet Explorer's hashing functions (in advapi32.dll). It is present here solely for your edificaton and entertainment.