It creates long (512-bit) digests, and: Even a small change in the message will (with an extremely high probability of 1-10^(-154)) result in a different hash,

It creates long (512-bit) digests, and: Even a small change in the message will (with an extremely high probability of 1-10^(-154)) result in a different hash, which will usually look completely different just like two unrelated random numbers do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(cryptography) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(cryptography) I used it for a while, then learned that using a fast hash, even looped plenty of times, is a bad idea for password storage when you have easy access to B/scrypt.