In past times, when internet came out, people started thinking about security, they introduced passwords
but soon after other people started breaking them. people started finding more and more ways
to hack into systems for financial gains maybe.
after these problems started arising, people got really concerned about security
they tried to build more and more secure algorithms. which cost billions of dollars to break them.
That's what they think :p
SHA 256 is the second version of SHA algorithm after SHA 1,
it falls into the category of SHA 2 . which has 3 different algorithms.
So is it possible to break this algorithm? wait wait. what is breaking???
breaking an algorithm means, that if you have someone's public key, and you can find a method of getting
private key associated with it. you broke that system.
because the bitcoin address which you see, where you send payment. that is your public key..
and the private key is used to make transactions.. if you can find a method that if you provide it public key. and it gets you the private key. you actually cracked the system.. and that opens this possibility for you that you can take any public key.
e.g bitcoin address whre there are couple million dollars worth bitcoins stored.
so, how hard it is to break this algorithm? fortunately it is very tough, but its not a question of how it will be broken.
but the question is When, because people are cool. they can find methods to break algorithms
they did with MD5, SHA1 and other algorithms. maybe some day, a person will come out with an out of the box strategy
on how to break SHA 2
don't be afraid though. its not going to happen very soon.
because mostly people who break things. i guess they are using the same old fashioned ugly, methods of breaking cryptography which they used to break other algorithms. they can't use them because SHA 256 was made so that those methods of breaking it don't work..
