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Process of rendering cardholder data unreadable by converting data into a fixed-length message digest via Strong Cryptography. Hashing is a (mathematical) function in which a non-secret algorithm takes any arbitrary length message as input and produces a fixed length output (usually called a “hash code” or “message digest”). A hash function should have the following properties: §   (1) It is computationally infeasible to determine the original input given only the hash code,
§   (2) It is computationally infeasible to find two inputs that give the same hash code.
In the context of PCI DSS, hashing must be applied to the entire PAN for the hash code to be considered rendered unreadable.

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