Hash String via SHA-256 in Java

Question

By looking around here as well as the internet in general, I have found Bouncy Castle. I want to use Bouncy Castle (or some other freely available utility) to generate a SHA-256 Hash of a String in Java. Looking at their documentation I can't seem to find any good examples of what I want to do. Can anybody here help me out?

Answer 1

To hash a string, use the built-in MessageDigest class:

import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import java.math.BigInteger;

public class CryptoHash {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
    MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
    String text = "Text to hash, cryptographically.";

    // Change this to UTF-16 if needed
    md.update(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
    byte[] digest = md.digest();

    String hex = String.format("%064x", new BigInteger(1, digest));
    System.out.println(hex);
  }
}

In the snippet above, digest contains the hashed string and hex contains a hexadecimal ASCII string with left zero padding.