Hash Generator

About this hash generator

A cryptographic hash function takes an input of any length and returns a fixed-length fingerprint. Change one bit of the input and the digest changes completely; the same input always yields the same digest. That determinism is what makes hashes useful for verifying downloads, detecting duplicate files and addressing content in Git and in content-addressed storage.

MD5 and SHA-1 are both considered broken for security purposes. Practical collisions have been demonstrated for MD5 since 2004 and for SHA-1 since 2017 (the SHAttered attack), which means an attacker can construct two different inputs with the same digest. Use them to detect accidental corruption, or to compare against a checksum a vendor already published — never as a signature or an integrity guarantee against a motivated adversary. For anything security-relevant, use SHA-256 or SHA-512.

None of these functions is a password hash. They are deliberately fast, so a GPU can test billions of candidate passwords per second against a stolen digest. Password storage needs a slow, salted, memory-hard construction such as bcrypt, scrypt or Argon2, which are not offered here and should not be replaced by anything on this page.