How the SHA-2 (SHA-256) Hashing Algorithm Works

Mikhail Raevskiy
9 min readAug 24, 2020

SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is one of the most popular families of hashing algorithms. In this article, we’ll walk through each step of the SHA-256 algorithm, which belongs to SHA-2, and show how it works with a real example.

What is a hash function?

If you want to know more about hash functions, you can read Wikipedia. But to understand…

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Mikhail Raevskiy

Bioinformatician at Oncobox Inc. (@oncobox). Research Associate