So was wondering if someone could enlighten me on the difference between encoding/encrypting vise versa 
And is the salt of the hash what is used to decrypt or encrypt?

Hash is the one-way function, you don't decrypt it or decode it.

so for instance let's take SHA1 hash of word "breach", it's "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b".

So if you didn't know that, and I gave you hash "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b", how would you convert it back to "breach"? Only way is that you take a wordlist, like list of all words in english language and check each one if it equals "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b".

What you can also do is do that in advance, for instance you could calculate SHA1 hash of all six letter words and store them in a table, then when you get SHA1 hashes you could just search hash without
needing to check each word. That is called a "rainbow table".

Salt is added to prevent that kind of rainbow table guessing. it is added to the initial password, so hash turns out different and can't be looked up in rainbow table.

Btw, title seems to be unrelated to what you're asking? Passing the hash is related to Windows Active Directory networks

(September 27, 2022, 07:15 PM)sockpuppet3 Wrote: Hash is the one-way function, you don't decrypt it or decode it.

so for instance let's take SHA1 hash of word "breach", it's "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b".

So if you didn't know that, and I gave you hash "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b", how would you convert it back to "breach"? Only way is that you take a wordlist, like list of all words in english language and check each one if it equals "a8f316c41ebcc6d026768fa7b8fc5c2a5336f93b".

What you can also do is do that in advance, for instance you could calculate SHA1 hash of all six letter words and store them in a table, then when you get SHA1 hashes you could just search hash without
needing to check each word. That is called a "rainbow table".

Salt is added to prevent that kind of rainbow table guessing. it is added to the initial password, so hash turns out different and can't be looked up in rainbow table.

Btw, title seems to be unrelated to what you're asking? Passing the hash is related to Windows Active Directory networks

Ahh thanks for clarifying. I had seen several articles about passing the hash thats why i put a question mark.
I discerned the concept of the encryption but just didn’t understand what the salt was or did. Your explanation of the difference in what a rainbow table is was A1 definitely appreciated.

this is nice