@mikero a case can be made that if the homework is graded and contributes to the student's grade, such questions can be flagged and locked, answers deleted until the deadline is over. But I don't want to enforce this single-handedly, so I'd suggest you look around on our meta and / or open a new post there

Simple question... is a MAC the concept of combining a Message + a Secret Key in a hash function to produce a digest. Or is a MAC the result of combining a Message + a Secret Key (i.e., is it the same as the term digest is to a hashing algorithm)

@Eddie Is there a reason you aren't asking on the main site?

A perfect salt mitigates this and adds credence to the question. – Paul Uszak 1 hour ago

Not that there's anything wrong with asking in chat

@FutureSecurity Hah yeah I saw that too

@Eddie Both. To avoid confusion you could use "MAC algorithm" and "tag" respectively.