What is hashing?

Hashing is a process of transforming any given key or string of characters into another value. This is done using a hash function, which is an algorithm. The resulting value is typically a fixed-size, and is called a "hash value", "hash code", "hash sum", or simply "hash". Hashing is used for various purposes including data integrity checks (e.g., verifying downloaded files), password storage (storing password hashes instead of plain text passwords), and data indexing in hash tables, enabling efficient data lookup.