i get that SHA256 isn’t considered “encryption”, it’s something to do with hashing. so, if i encrypt “hello” into a random string of characters, why is it said to be impossible to decrypt it back to “hello”? if you had a maths equation like P = (k * 10 / G) / (4x * 5gl), it’s possible to work backwards to find the value of k or g eventually. why not with SHA256? is it something to do with random numbers?
In: Mathematics
It isn’t impossible from a mathematical standpoint. To “solve” the problem is a problem of factorization. The simplest explanation is that given a large number the problem to solve (ie to decode it without a key) is to find the correct factors. Although there are methods to reduce the problem size, the only way to figure this out is to repeatedly test different numbers.
A good encoding scheme makes it infeasible, not impossible to crack, because even using the fastest supercomputers today, it would take months to break a SINGLE message. A “normal” computer would be expected to take many years (centuries) to do this.
Therefore, in a practical sense, the code is considered unbreakable.
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