In cryptography, we often focus on making sure we can create a hash for any number of bytes as an input. But what happens if we have a short input that we want to hash? Using methods such as SHA-1 and SHA-2 (aka SHA-256) will often be inefficient as they tend to compress (or squeeze) the data inputs through a number of stages. The focus is thus to squeeze the data down to a standard number of bits and then add collision protection…
