SHA512 Hash Generator

The SHA512 Hash Generator takes whatever text you type and returns its SHA-512 digest: a 128-character hexadecimal string, computed with Node's crypto module right in the page. Tick the salt box and the salt value is appended to your text before hashing. It is a small tool for developers who need a quick digest to compare against, seed a fixture, or check how salting changes the output, without opening a terminal.

What you can set

There are two inputs. The text box holds the message to hash; it can be a single word, a password, a JSON blob or a whole paragraph. Below it is a salt field, pre-filled with a random 16-byte value (32 hex characters) that is regenerated every time the page loads. The salt is only used when the Include salt checkbox is ticked. Untick it and the tool hashes the raw text alone, which is what you want when you are comparing against a hash produced somewhere else.

When salting is on, the tool computes SHA512(text + salt), so the salt goes after the text, not before it. Keep that in mind if you need to reproduce the same digest in another language: hashlib.sha512((text + salt).encode()).hexdigest() in Python will match, sha512(salt + text) will not.

What the result looks like

Every run returns exactly 128 hex characters (64 bytes), whatever the input length, with a copy button next to it. Change a single character in the input and the whole digest changes, which is the property people rely on when they use hashes as fingerprints. The same text with the same salt always gives the same result, so you can re-run it to double-check.

The digests in the table are real, so you can paste the inputs into the tool and check them. The hash of the empty string, starting cf83e135, is a well-known constant and a handy way to confirm any SHA-512 implementation.

Where a quick SHA-512 comes in handy

• Checking a download. Some projects publish SHA-512 sums next to release files. Hash the file's contents, or the string the vendor tells you to hash, and compare the first and last few characters.
• Writing test fixtures. When a test asserts that a function returns the SHA-512 of a known string, this is faster than spinning up a REPL to get the expected value.
• Seeing what salting does. Hash a password with and without the salt to show a colleague or a class why two users with the same password end up with different stored hashes.
• Deterministic IDs. Some pipelines derive record IDs from a hash of the content. Paste the content here to work out which ID a record should have.

SHA-512 versus the other hashes on this site

SHA-512 belongs to the SHA-2 family, alongside SHA-256, SHA-384 and the truncated SHA-512/256 variants. It works on 64-bit words in 80 rounds and produces a 512-bit digest, twice the length of the SHA256 Hash Generator output and four times that of MD5. On 64-bit CPUs it is often faster than SHA-256 for long inputs, which is one reason it shows up in Linux /etc/shadow entries (the $6$ prefix) and in package signature files. If you want to try the whole family from one page, the SHA2 Hash Generator covers it, and the SHA1 Hash Generator is there for legacy checksums.

Two honest caveats. First, a plain SHA-512, salted or not, is not the right way to store passwords in a production system; use a slow, tunable function such as bcrypt, scrypt or Argon2. The salt option here is for learning and testing. Second, hashing is one-way and not encryption: nothing here can turn a digest back into the text. If you need a reversible encoding for transport, that is what the Base64 Generator does.

Need a string to hash in the first place? The Random Password Generator makes a strong one, and the rest of the developer utilities are listed under all developer & test data tools.