SHA-512 digests, computed in your browser.
SHA-512 produces a 512-bit digest, written as 128 hexadecimal characters.
Enter some text above to see its SHA-512 digest.
From the maker of MakeUUID
What SHA-512 is good for, and what it is not.
SHA-512 is the wide sibling of SHA-256 in the SHA-2 family. It works on 64-bit words rather than 32-bit ones, which makes it noticeably faster than SHA-256 on 64-bit CPUs that lack SHA hardware instructions, and it gives a much larger digest to work with.
Reach for it when you want a long output rather than more security margin, since 256 bits is already far beyond what anything can brute force. Common cases are key derivation and expansion, where HKDF-SHA512 hands you plenty of output material at once; HMAC keying; and formats such as sha512sum manifests and the modern crypt(3) password schemes. SHA-384 is simply SHA-512 truncated, which is why it shows up in TLS cipher suites.
The trade-offs are size and speed profile. A 128-character digest is unwieldy in URLs, filenames and log lines, and on 32-bit or embedded targets SHA-512 is the slower choice. When neither matters, either one is a sound pick.