Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually

• applied_crypto_2021_fall

  4 39 1.8 Python

  problem sets for CS-GY 6903 Applied Cryptography

Oh this is great. When we taught SHA-256 last semester, we linked to this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/f9EbD6iY9zI. Next time we do it, we'll probably link to both. Having several different ways to visualize the same thing is very helpful.

A couple of details missing from this visualization are how you pad a message to be a multiple of the block size, and how you chain blocks together to form a longer message. In the pseudocode at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Pseudocode, that's the "Pre-processing (Padding)" part and the "for each chunk" loop just below it. I get why you'd want to leave those things out, since they're not really the interesting part, and the screen is already pretty packed as it is.

If anyone's feeling curious about implementing this yourself, take a look at these project notes: https://github.com/oconnor663/applied_crypto_2021_fall/tree/.... At some point I'll clean that up for public consumption, but for now just ignore the parts about grades and cheating :)

• hashcat

  103 19,873 8.8 C

  World's fastest and most advanced password recovery utility

  

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• iavl

  1 407 8.2 Go

  Merkleized IAVL+ Tree implementation in Go

  

• sha256-animation

  5 3,313 2.8 Ruby

  Animation of the SHA-256 hash function in your terminal.

Similar project which visualizes SHA-256 into terminal: https://github.com/in3rsha/sha256-animation

Suggest a related project