How to hash some string with sha256 in Java?

Question

How to hash some string with sha256 in Java ? Does anybody know any free library for this ?

Answer 1

SHA-256 isn't an "encoding" - it's a one-way hash.

You'd basically convert the string into bytes (e.g. using text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)) and then hash the bytes. Note that the result of the hash would also be arbitrary binary data, and if you want to represent that in a string, you should use base64 or hex... don't try to use the String(byte[], String) constructor.

e.g.

MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
byte[] hash = digest.digest(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));

Answer 2

I think that the easiest solution is to use Apache Common Codec:

String sha256hex = org.apache.commons.codec.digest.DigestUtils.sha256Hex(stringText);   

Answer 3

Another alternative is Guava which has an easy-to-use suite of Hashing utilities. For example, to hash a string using SHA256 as a hex-string you would simply do:

final String hashed = Hashing.sha256()
        .hashString("your input", StandardCharsets.UTF_8)
        .toString();

Answer 4

Full example hash to string as another string.

public static String sha256(String base) {
    try{
        MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        byte[] hash = digest.digest(base.getBytes("UTF-8"));
        StringBuffer hexString = new StringBuffer();

        for (int i = 0; i < hash.length; i++) {
            String hex = Integer.toHexString(0xff & hash[i]);
            if(hex.length() == 1) hexString.append('0');
            hexString.append(hex);
        }

        return hexString.toString();
    } catch(Exception ex){
       throw new RuntimeException(ex);
    }
}

Answer 5

If you are using Java 8 you can encode the byte[] by doing

MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
byte[] hash = digest.digest(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
String encoded = Base64.getEncoder().encodeToString(hash);

Answer 6

String hashWith256(String textToHash) {
    MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
    byte[] byteOfTextToHash = textToHash.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
    byte[] hashedByetArray = digest.digest(byteOfTextToHash);
    String encoded = Base64.getEncoder().encodeToString(hashedByetArray);
    return encoded;
}

Answer 7

Convert Java String to Sha-256 Hash

import java.security.MessageDigest;

public class CodeSnippets {

 public static String getSha256(String value) {
    try{
        MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        md.update(value.getBytes());
        return bytesToHex(md.digest());
    } catch(Exception ex){
        throw new RuntimeException(ex);
    }
 }
 private static String bytesToHex(byte[] bytes) {
    StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer();
    for (byte b : bytes) result.append(Integer.toString((b & 0xff) + 0x100, 16).substring(1));
    return result.toString();
 }
}

Answer 8

I traced the Apache code through DigestUtils and sha256 seems to default back to java.security.MessageDigest for calculation. Apache does not implement an independent sha256 solution. I was looking for an independent implementation to compare against the java.security library. FYI only.

Answer 9

You can use MessageDigest in the following way:

public static String getSHA256(String data){
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
    try{
        MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        md.update(data.getBytes());
        byte byteData[] = md.digest();

        for (int i = 0; i < byteData.length; i++) {
         sb.append(Integer.toString((byteData[i] & 0xff) + 0x100, 16).substring(1));
        }
    } catch(Exception e){
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

Answer 10

Here is a slightly more performant way to turn the digest into a hex string:

private static final char[] hexArray = "0123456789abcdef".toCharArray();

public static String getSHA256(String data) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    try {
        MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        md.update(data.getBytes());
        byte[] byteData = md.digest();
        sb.append(bytesToHex(byteData);
    } catch(Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

private static String bytesToHex(byte[] bytes) {
    char[] hexChars = new char[bytes.length * 2];
    for ( int j = 0; j < bytes.length; j++ ) {
        int v = bytes[j] & 0xFF;
        hexChars[j * 2] = hexArray[v >>> 4];
        hexChars[j * 2 + 1] = hexArray[v & 0x0F];
    }
    return String.valueOf(hexChars);
}

Does anyone know of a faster way in Java?

Answer 11

This was my approach using Kotlin:

private fun getHashFromEmailString(email : String) : String{
    val charset = Charsets.UTF_8
    val byteArray = email.toByteArray(charset)
    val digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256")
    val hash = digest.digest(byteArray)

    return hash.toString()
}