What is SHA1 fingerprint?

Question

I am obtaining a Google Play API key from Google, and it is asking to enter SHA1 fingerprint. I want to know what is SHA1 fingerprint? I also wanted to know weather this API key

Answer 1

It is a standard for the implementation of a 'secure hash algorithm' - a one-way cryptographic function that can be used to act as a 'signature' of a sequence of bytes. It is very unlikely that 2 different byte sequences would produce the same value (though not impossible)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1

Note that there are other, more robust standards out there these days e.g. SHA256 and beyond.