The Avalanche Effect

Note: This article is to be read after my article on One-Way Functions.

Let us generate SHA256 for the following two words: “Hackernoon” and “hackernoon”.

Generating SHA256 for any text is pretty easy with the help of online tools like SHA256 Hash Generator.

SHA256 of “Hackernoon”:

SHA256(Hackernoon)

SHA256 of “hackernoon”:

SHA256(hackernoon)

Above we have calculated SHA256 for the same word, but one of them is in sentence case.

Let us convert the hexadecimal hash into its corresponding decimal number. This conversion can be done pretty easily with a Javascript Web Console.

Decimal value SHA256 of “Hackernoon”

Decimal value SHA256 of “hackernoon”

If you observe just by Capitalizing “h” , there is a drastic change in the output.

Small changes in the input causing a drastic change in the output is known as “Avalanche Effect”.

It is very important to understand Avalanche effect since this property of SHA256 is one of the reasons why Satoshi Nakomoto has used it for the underlying cryptography of Bitcoin Blockchain.

In the next article we will have a deep dive into “Hashing Algorithms”. Stay tuned for the updates!

The following quote was my motivation behind writing this article:

“Let’s try to secure everything.”~Nick Szabo

Thank you for reading my article.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email. You can also contact me via Linkedin. You can also follow me on Twitter.

In order to get started with Blockchain read my article published on Hackernoon