SHA-2 is a set of cryptographic hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256) designed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and published in 2001 by the NIST as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). SHA stands for Secure Hash Algorithm. SHA-2 includes a significant number of changes from its predecessor, SHA-1. SHA-2 currently consists of a set of six hash functions with digests that are 224, 256, 384 or 512 bits.
SHA-256 and SHA-512 are novel hash functions computed with 32 and 64-bit words, respectively. They use different shift am...