Cryptographic hash functions are used in various contexts, for example, to compute the message digest when making a digital signature. A hash function compresses the bits of a message to a fixed-size hash value in a way that distributes the possible messages evenly among the possible hash values. A cryptographic hash function does this in a way that makes it extremely difficult to come up with a message that would hash to a particular hash value.

Cryptographic hash functions typically produce hash values of 128 or more bits. The number of different hash values thus obtained, 2¹²⁸, is vastly larger than the number of different messages likely to ever be exchanged in the world. The reason for requiring more than 128 bits is based on the birthday paradox. The birthday paradox roughly states that given a hash function mapping any message to an 128-bit hash digest, we can expect that the same digest will be computed twice when 2⁶⁴ randomly selected messages have been hashed. As cheaper memory chips for computers become available it may become necessary to require larger than 128 bit message digests (such as 160 bits as has become standard recently).

Many good cryptographic hash functions are freely available. The most famous cryptographic hash functions are those of the MD family: MD4, MD5, SHA-1, and RipeMD-160. Of these, MD4, MD5, and SHA-1 have been broken. MD4 and MD5 should be considered insecure and not used anymore. SHA-1 is still widely used, although its stronger counterparts, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 are likely to replace it in the future.