Hash String via SHA-256 in Java

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?

Solution 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.

Solution 2:

This is already implemented in the runtime libs.

public static String calc(InputStream is) {
    String output;
    int read;
    byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];

    try {
        MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        while ((read = is.read(buffer)) > 0) {
            digest.update(buffer, 0, read);
        }
        byte[] hash = digest.digest();
        BigInteger bigInt = new BigInteger(1, hash);
        output = bigInt.toString(16);
        while ( output.length() < 32 ) {
            output = "0"+output;
        }
    } 
    catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace(System.err);
        return null;
    }

    return output;
}

In a JEE6+ environment one could also use JAXB DataTypeConverter:

import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;

String hash = DatatypeConverter.printHexBinary( 
           MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5").digest("SOMESTRING".getBytes("UTF-8")));