Crypto Core Education

What is the difference between encryption and hashing?

Encryption and hashing are both cryptographic operations, but they serve opposite purposes: encryption is reversible and protects confidentiality, while hashing is one-way and protects integrity. Encryption scrambles data so that anyone with the correct key can decrypt it back to the original, which is how private messages stay private. Hashing converts data into a fixed-length fingerprint that cannot be reversed, used to verify that data has not changed. For example, a password is typically stored as a hash so it can be checked without being recovered, whereas a confidential file is encrypted so it can later be read again.