8.1-8.2, due on October 31

The Thrilling

I was excited to see that this chapter heading was "Hash Functions" because the first thing my husband said when I told him I was enrolled in this cryptography class was something about hash functions. I had no idea what he was talking about, but now, I'm semi-knowledgeable! Plus, it's cool that they're used for digital signatures so all of my signatures on checks that get scanned are securely documented, but safe from being hacked into.

The Haunting (October 31... get it?)

I'm assuming that "array" means matrix...
So we learned how to get our Hash Function by XORing the different columns of the matrix (sometimes after rotations) but how do we use it? Is it supposed to be the one-way function we'd use in another system?