How to calculate Hash with .NET Cryptography – Blockchain

Learn How to compute SHA256 Hash in C#. Hashing (also known as hash functions) in cryptography is a process of mapping a binary string of an arbitrary length to a small binary string of a fixed length, known as a hash value, a hash code, or a hash. Hash functions are a common way to protect secure sensitive data such as passwords and digital signatures. Some of the modern commonly-used hash functions are MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, and SHA512.

The ComputeHash method of HashAlgorithm computes a hash. It takes a byte array or stream as an input and returns a hash in the form of a byte array of 256 bits.

byte[] bytes = sha256Hash.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(rawData));

No matter how big the input data is, the hash will always be 256 chars. The following code snippet is an example of how to create a hash of a string.

 static string ComputeSha256Hash(string rawData) 
{ 
// Create a SHA256 
using (SHA256 sha256Hash = SHA256.Create()) 
{ 
// ComputeHash - returns byte array 
byte[] bytes = sha256Hash.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(rawData)); 

// Convert byte array to a string 
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(); 
for (int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++) 
{ 
builder.Append(bytes[i].ToString("x2")); 
} 
return builder.ToString(); 
} 
}