SHA-256 Hash
Generate the SHA-256 hash (256-bit digest) of any string. Cryptographically secure and widely used.
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About SHA-256 Hash
SHA-256 is part of the SHA-2 family and produces a 256-bit (64 hex character) digest. It's the current workhorse cryptographic hash function — used by TLS certificates, Bitcoin, Git's next-generation IDs, content addressing, and most file-integrity checksums published today. No practical attack against SHA-256 is known.
When to use it
- Verifying file downloads against published SHA-256 sums
- Generating cryptographic fingerprints of content
- Producing the input to digital signatures
- Building content-addressed storage systems
How it works
Input is encoded as UTF-8 and processed through SHA-256 in WebAssembly via hash-wasm. The 256-bit result is presented as 64 lowercase hex characters.
Examples
Hello, world!
315f5bdb76d078c43b8ac0064e4a0164612b1fce77c869345bfc94c75894edd3
Frequently asked questions
- Is SHA-256 secure for passwords?
- Not on its own. SHA-256 is fast and unsalted, so a password storage scheme based on it can be brute-forced. Use bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 for passwords; SHA-256 is for everything else.
- How does it compare to SHA-512?
- SHA-512 has more bits (512 vs 256) and is faster on 64-bit processors. SHA-256 is more compact in its output and faster on 32-bit hardware. For most uses, SHA-256 is plenty.