What is this tool?
Generate cryptographic hash digests using MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 directly in your browser. Supports custom cryptographic salts with prepend/append configurations and text file drag-and-drop.
When to use it?
Calculate file checksums to verify download integrity, create cryptographic digests for data deduplication, or compute hashes for development testing.
How does it work?
Uses the W3C Web Crypto API (crypto.subtle.digest) for hardware-accelerated SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 calculations. Uses an internal pure JavaScript implementation for legacy MD5 checksums.
Security Notice & Verification Context
Hashing is a one-way mathematical digest, not encryption (which is reversible with a key) and not encoding (which is a reversible representation). MD5 and SHA-1 have known cryptographic collision weaknesses and must not be used for security-critical applications or password storage.
Operating Limits & Considerations
- Web Crypto processes files in browser memory; files larger than 2 MB should be processed using native command line utilities (sha256sum) to avoid browser tab memory pressure.
- This tool computes standard cryptographic digests. For password storage, use adaptive password-hashing functions like bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 instead of raw fast hashes.
Example Conversions
Input: "cooltools", Algorithm: SHA-256
SHA-256: 4b2958ff62ff054c2049d564bbda2c8b87d2ef1492c6e6e06b3a033f6b9bc607
Standards & Technical References
Frequently Asked Questions
Hashing is a one-way mathematical transformation that produces a fixed-length digest and cannot be reversed. Encryption is a two-way transformation designed to protect confidentiality, reversible only with a secret key. Encoding (like Base64) is a data format conversion for transmission, easily reversed without any key.
Researchers have demonstrated practical collision attacks against MD5 (generating two distinct files with the exact same hash). Use SHA-256 or SHA-512 for security applications.