Hash functions are one-way functions, which map data of arbitrary size to a fixed output length. Most of the hash functions in Botan are designed to be cryptographically secure, which means that it is computationally infeasible to create a collision (finding two inputs with the same hash) or preimages (given a hash output, generating an arbitrary input with the same hash). But note that not all such hash functions meet their goals, in particular MD4 and MD5 are trivially broken. However they are still included due to their wide adoption in various protocols.

Using a hash function is typically split into three stages: initialization, update, and finalization (often referred to as a IUF interface). The initialization stage is implicit: after creating a hash function object, it is ready to process data. Then update is called one or more times. Calling update several times is equivalent to calling it once with all of the arguments concatenated. After completing a hash computation (eg using hashFinal), the internal state is reset to begin hashing a new message.