Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 642 posts.

Security & Privacy
351

How SHA-256 Works Step-by-Step

SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hash algorithms around. A cryptographic hash, also often referred to as a "digest", "fingerprint" or "signature", is an almost perfectly unique string of characters that is generated from a separate piece of input text. SHA-256…