With the caveat that I haven’t read how google is implementing this I can provide some high level context on how hashes work from a security perspective.
Anyone else feel free to correct anything I get wrong here.
So, once upon a time someone came up with something called md5 for encrypting things. This didn’t end up being a very effective way of encrypting files, but people did find that encrypting files this way was a great way to predictably create a value that would be unique to that specific file.
So if you take an md5 hash of a .txt files with “goat testicles” in it, called goats.txt, and someone sends you a file called goats.txt, you should be able to take an md5 hash of the file before opening it, and if they match up they’re the same file. If someone adds a “z” to the end of goats.txt the md5 hash will change so you’ll know it’s not the same file.
With the caveat that I haven’t read how google is implementing this I can provide some high level context on how hashes work from a security perspective.
Anyone else feel free to correct anything I get wrong here.
So, once upon a time someone came up with something called md5 for encrypting things. This didn’t end up being a very effective way of encrypting files, but people did find that encrypting files this way was a great way to predictably create a value that would be unique to that specific file.
So if you take an md5 hash of a .txt files with “goat testicles” in it, called goats.txt, and someone sends you a file called goats.txt, you should be able to take an md5 hash of the file before opening it, and if they match up they’re the same file. If someone adds a “z” to the end of goats.txt the md5 hash will change so you’ll know it’s not the same file.