Hashing is the process of taking a piece of data and turning it into unrecognizable mush. There are different hashing algorithms, with one of the most popular being one called SHA-256. If you apply the SHA-256 hashing algorithm to the word password, this is what the resulting hash looks like:

5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8

What we just did is we hashed the word password. However, we did not encrypt the word password. “Encrypting” implies that something can be decrypted, which is not possible with a hash. “Decrypting” means to apply a process to transform data back to its original form, but hashing is a one-way function, meaning a hash cannot be decrypted.

We can find out what this hash started out as (namely, the word password). To do this, we will first create a large table of hashes created from known passwords (like password) by taking the 1000 most popular passwords and hashing them with the SHA-256 algorithm. Then we will look up the hash in the table, and find the password associated with it.

This process is called cracking a hash. Cracking means looking it up. Decrypting means transforming it. Do you get the difference?

I certainly hope so. Please never, ever say “we decrypted the hash.” Doing this makes you sound ignorant. I don’t want you to sound ignorant. Say “we cracked the hash” instead.