Hashb

Hashb is a term used in some educational and hobbyist contexts to refer to a hypothetical cryptographic hash function. It is not an official standard and there is no single agreed-upon specification. In teaching materials, hashb is used as a generic model to illustrate typical properties of cryptographic hash functions rather than as a concrete algorithm.

In these contexts, hashb is described as having characteristics common to cryptographic hashes: determinism (the same input yields the same output), a fixed output length, and rapid computation. It is usually discussed in terms of basic security notions such as preimage resistance (difficulty of reversing the hash to recover the input), second preimage resistance, and the avalanche effect (small changes in input produce large changes in output). These ideas are presented conceptually, without asserting a specific construction or guaranteed security.

Variants of hashb in educational material may vary in output size, existence of salts, or incorporation into teaching exercises like Merkle trees, digital signatures, or hash-based data structures. They are typically implemented as toy examples in software libraries or classroom problems to demonstrate how hashing fits into broader cryptographic workflows.

Hashb is generally not intended for real-world security use. For practical applications, established and standardized hash functions such as SHA-256 or SHA-3 are recommended, along with appropriate protocol-level protections and security analyses. See also cryptographic hash function, preimage resistance, collision resistance, and Merkle tree.