Questions related to hashes, hash values or hash codes that are returned by hash functions such as MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 and provide a simple way to check the integrity of a download.
A hash is any well-defined procedure or mathematical function that converts a large, possibly variable-sized amount of data into a small datum, usually a single integer representing the sum of the correct digits in a piece of stored or transmitted digital data, against which later comparisons can be made to detect errors in the data. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash sums, checksums or simply hashes.
