Asynchronous SHA256 Hashing

Question

I have the following method:

public static string Sha256Hash(string input) {
    if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(input)) return String.Empty;
    using(HashAlgorithm algorithm = new SHA256CryptoServiceProvider()) {
        byte[] inputBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);
        byte[] hashBytes = algorithm.ComputeHash(inputBytes);
        return BitConverter.ToString(hashBytes).Replace("-", String.Empty);
    }
}

Is there a way to make it asynchronous? I was hoping to use the async and await keywords, but the HashAlgorithm class does not provide any asynchronous support for this.

Another approach was to encapsulate all the logic in a:

public static async string Sha256Hash(string input) {
     return await Task.Run(() => {
         //Hashing here...
     });
}

But this does not seem clean and I'm not sure if it's a correct (or efficient) way to perform an operation asynchronously.

What can I do to accomplish this?

Answer 1

As stated by the other answerers, hashing is a CPU-bound activity so it doesn't have Async methods you can call. You can, however, make your hashing method async by asynchronously reading the file block by block and then hashing the bytes you read from the file. The hashing will be done synchronously but the read will be asynchronous and consequently your entire method will be async.

Here is sample code for achieving the purpose I just described.

public static async Threading.Tasks.Task<string> GetHashAsync<T>(this Stream stream) 
    where T : HashAlgorithm, new()
{
    StringBuilder sb;

    using (var algo = new T())
    {
        var buffer = new byte[8192];
        int bytesRead;

        // compute the hash on 8KiB blocks
        while ((bytesRead = await stream.ReadAsync(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) != 0)
            algo.TransformBlock(buffer, 0, bytesRead, buffer, 0);
        algo.TransformFinalBlock(buffer, 0, bytesRead);

        // build the hash string
        sb = new StringBuilder(algo.HashSize / 4);
        foreach (var b in algo.Hash)
            sb.AppendFormat("{0:x2}", b);
    }

    return sb?.ToString();
}

The function can be invoked as such

using (var stream = System.IO.File.OpenRead(@"C:\path\to\file.txt"))
    string sha256 = await stream.GetHashAsync<SHA256CryptoServiceProvider>();

Of course,you could equally call the method with other hash algorithms such as SHA1CryptoServiceProvider or SHA512CryptoServiceProvider as the generic type parameter.

Likewise with a few modifications, you can also get it to hash a string as is specific to your case.

Answer 2

The work that you're doing is inherently synchronous CPU bound work. It's not inherently asynchronous as something like network IO is going to be. If you would like to run some synchronous CPU bound work in another thread and asynchronously wait for it to be completed, then Task.Run is indeed the proper tool to accomplish that, assuming the operation is sufficiently long running to need to perform it asynchronously.

That said, there really isn't any reason to expose an asynchronous wrapper over your synchronous method. It generally makes more sense to just expose the method synchronously, and if a particular caller needs it to run asynchronously in another thread, they can use Task.Run to explicitly indicate that need for that particular invocation.