SHA-256 Hash Generator

This tool is completely free and ad-free. It's built by the maker of StatusHarbor - uptime monitoring with public status pages for your services. If you're generating IDs for something you're building, StatusHarbor will tell you the moment it goes down.

SHA-256 is the default general-purpose hash today. It is a member of the SHA-2 family, has no known practical collision or preimage attacks after two decades of analysis, and is what you should reach for unless you have a specific reason not to. Most CPUs since about 2015 have hardware instructions for it, so it is fast in practice as well as safe.

Typical uses: verifying that a downloaded artifact matches its published checksum, addressing content by its hash the way container image digests and Nix store paths do, signing with HMAC-SHA256 in webhook and API authentication schemes, and forming the digest half of JWS and X.509 signatures. Bitcoin block hashing is SHA-256 applied twice.

One thing SHA-256 is not built for is passwords. It is deliberately fast, which is exactly the wrong property when an attacker is guessing billions of candidates. Store passwords with a slow, salted, memory-hard function such as Argon2id, scrypt or bcrypt instead.