A hash buster is a
program
Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to:
Business and management
* Program management, the process of managing several related projects
* Time management
* Program, a part of planning
Arts and entertainment Audio
* Progra ...
which randomly adds characters to data in order to change the data's
hash sum
A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values. The values returned by a hash function are called ''hash values'', ''hash codes'', ''digests'', or simply ''hashes''. The values are usually u ...
.
This is typically used to add words to
spam
Spam may refer to:
* Spam (food), a canned pork meat product
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...
e-mails, to bypass
hash filter
A hash filter creates a hash sum from data, typically e-mail, and compares the sum against other previously defined sums. Depending on the purpose of the filter, the data can then be included or excluded in a function based on whether it matches a ...
s. As the e-mail's hash sum is different from the sum of e-mails previously defined as spam, the e-mail is not considered spam and therefore delivered as if it were a normal message.
Hash busters can also be used to randomly add content to any kind of file until the hash sum becomes a certain sum. In e-mail context, this could be used to bypass a filter which only accepts e-mails with a certain sum.
Initially spams containing "white noise" from hash busters tended to simply exhibit 'paragraphs' of literally random words, but increasingly these are now appearing somewhat grammatical.
See also
*
Cryptographic hash function
A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm (a map of an arbitrary binary string to a binary string with fixed size of n bits) that has special properties desirable for cryptography:
* the probability of a particular n-bit output re ...
*
Bayesian poisoning
Bayesian poisoning is a technique used by e-mail spammers to attempt to degrade the effectiveness of spam filters that rely on Bayesian spam filtering. Bayesian filtering relies on Bayesian probability to determine whether an incoming mail is spam ...
*
Locality-sensitive hashing In computer science, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is an algorithmic technique that hashes similar input items into the same "buckets" with high probability. (The number of buckets is much smaller than the universe of possible input items.) Since ...
References
External links
searchCIO.com Definitions
{{Spamming
Spamming
Random text generation