Input
About Hash Functions
What is Hashing?
A hash function takes an input of any size and produces a fixed-size output (the hash or digest). The same input always produces the same hash, but even a small change in the input results in a completely different hash.
MD5
MD5 produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash. It is fast but considered cryptographically broken. Still commonly used for checksums and non-security file integrity verification.
SHA Family
SHA-1 (160-bit) is deprecated for security use. SHA-256 and SHA-512 (from the SHA-2 family) are widely used in TLS, digital signatures, and blockchain. SHA-384 is a truncated variant of SHA-512.
Output Formats
Hexadecimal is the most common representation, using characters 0-9 and a-f. Base64 encodes the same bytes more compactly using A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, and /.