Message Authentication Code
/ɛm æk/
n. “Trust the message — not the path it traveled.”
MAC, short for Message Authentication Code, is a cryptographic construct designed to answer a deceptively simple question: has this message been altered, and did it come from someone who knows the secret? A MAC provides integrity and authenticity, but not secrecy. The contents of the message may be visible — what matters is that any tampering is detectable.
AEAD
/ˈiː-ɛe-dɛd/
n. “Encrypt it — and prove nobody touched it.”
AEAD, short for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data, is a class of cryptographic constructions designed to solve two problems at the same time: confidentiality and integrity. It ensures that data is kept secret and that any unauthorized modification of that data is reliably detected.
SHA2
/ˌes-eɪtʃ-ˈtuː/
n. “Stronger. Longer. Smarter.”
SHA1
/ˌes-eɪtʃ-ˈwʌn/
n. “Good enough… until it wasn’t.”
SHA1 is a cryptographic hash function born in an era when the internet still believed in handshakes, trust, and the idea that computational limits would politely remain limits. Designed by the NSA and standardized in the mid-1990s, SHA1 takes arbitrary input and produces a 160-bit fingerprint — a fixed-length digest meant to uniquely represent data, documents, passwords, or entire software releases.