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

My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup - 9th August 2025
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers - 8th August 2025
GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and model card - 7th August 2025

cryptography 22 hmac 2 security 534 sha1 4 signing 6

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