Hash functions got the name "hash" because it's easy to compute the function with a given input, but nearly impossible to reverse engineer the hash function to get the original input.

Question

True
True

False

Answer 1

False.

The term "hash" in hash functions is derived from the process of "hashing," which refers to the way the function takes an input of arbitrary size and maps it to a fixed-size output, often called a hash value or hash code. While it is indeed computationally easy to produce a hash from an input, and it is designed to be infeasible to reverse engineer the original input from the hash (a property known as pre-image resistance), the naming is not primarily because of these properties. The term "hash" more broadly relates to the idea of mixing or combining data in a way that produces a compact representation, rather than directly deriving from the ease of computation versus difficulty of reversal.