Glossary


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A compressed or condensed form of a document, or an abstract from a document, that functions as a "digital fingerprint" of the larger document. A message digest is used to create a digital signature that is unique to a particular document.A message digest can be made public without revealing the contents of the document from which it is derived. This is important in digital time-stamping, where, using hash functions, one can get a document time-stamped without revealing its contents to the time-stamping service.

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