One-way encryption methods

Question

This is a just a theoretical question. I'm at a point of starting to program a huge multi-server/multi-client network view.

Question:
What are the possible methods of Irreversible Encryption or aka One-Way Encryption? And what are the most suitable to be implemented in my case and in .NET?

Can anyone supply me with just a list of method names!

Answer 1

byte[] data = new byte[DATA_SIZE];
byte[] result;
SHA256 shaM = new SHA256Managed();
result = shaM.ComputeHash(data);

Here is the overview and here is the namespace with standard features. Simply look at HashAlgorithm and its descendants.

Answer 2

You basically want to either use MD5 or SHA-256. Oh, and FYI, if it's one way, it's called a hash. The MSDN documentation covers both hashes extensively.