Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index A one way function is a computable bijective function f with the following properties: The computation of is tractable (which generally means that a polynomial algorithm for the computation is known, see complexity theory). The computation of the inverse function is not tractable (i.e. no polynomial algorithm is known or exists). An example of a one way function is the discrete logarithm. One way functions are useful in cryptography, e.g. for digital signatures. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.