Simon Willison’s Weblog

Don't Hash Secrets. A well written explanation from 2008 of why you must use hmac instead of raw SHA-1 when hashing against a secret.

Posted 24th January 2010 at 1:30 pm

Recent articles

V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London - 27th August 2025
The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025

cryptography 22 hmac 2 security 541 sha1 4 signing 6

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