Hashing a string with Sha256

Question

Encoding.Unicode is Microsoft's misleading name for UTF-16 (a double-wide encoding, used in the Windows world for historical reasons but not used by anyone else). http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.encoding.unicode.aspx

If you inspect your bytes array, you'll see that every second byte is 0x00 (because of the double-wide encoding).

You should be using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes instead.

But also, you will see different results depending on whether or not you consider the terminating '\0' byte to be part of the data you're hashing. Hashing the two bytes "Hi" will give a different result from hashing the three bytes "Hi". You'll have to decide which you want to do. (Presumably you want to do whichever one your friend's PHP code is doing.)

For ASCII text, Encoding.UTF8 will definitely be suitable. If you're aiming for perfect compatibility with your friend's code, even on non-ASCII inputs, you'd better try a few test cases with non-ASCII characters such as é and 家 and see whether your results still match up. If not, you'll have to figure out what encoding your friend is really using; it might be one of the 8-bit "code pages" that used to be popular before the invention of Unicode. (Again, I think Windows is the main reason that anyone still needs to worry about "code pages".)

I also had this problem with another style of implementation but I forgot where I got it since it was 2 years ago.

static string sha256(string randomString)
{
    var crypt = new SHA256Managed();
    string hash = String.Empty;
    byte[] crypto = crypt.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(randomString));
    foreach (byte theByte in crypto)
    {
        hash += theByte.ToString("x2");
    }
    return hash;
}

When I input something like abcdefghi2013 for some reason it gives different results and results in errors in my login module. Then I tried modifying the code the same way as suggested by Quuxplusone and changed the encoding from ASCII to UTF8 then it finally worked!

static string sha256(string randomString)
{
    var crypt = new System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256Managed();
    var hash = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    byte[] crypto = crypt.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(randomString));
    foreach (byte theByte in crypto)
    {
        hash.Append(theByte.ToString("x2"));
    }
    return hash.ToString();
}

Thanks again Quuxplusone for the wonderful and detailed answer! :)

public static string ComputeSHA256Hash(string text)
{
    using (var sha256 = new SHA256Managed())
    {
        return BitConverter.ToString(sha256.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text))).Replace("-", "");
    }                
}

The reason why you get different results is because you don't use the same string encoding. The link you put for the on-line web site that computes SHA256 uses UTF8 Encoding, while in your example you used Unicode Encoding. They are two different encodings, so you don't get the same result. With the example above you get the same SHA256 hash of the linked web site. You need to use the same encoding also in PHP.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

In the PHP version you can send 'true' in the last parameter, but the default is 'false'. The following algorithm is equivalent to the default PHP's hash function when passing 'sha256' as the first parameter:

public static string GetSha256FromString(string strData)
    {
        var message = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(strData);
        SHA256Managed hashString = new SHA256Managed();
        string hex = "";

        var hashValue = hashString.ComputeHash(message);
        foreach (byte x in hashValue)
        {
            hex += String.Format("{0:x2}", x);
        }
        return hex;
    }

public string EncryptPassword(string password, string saltorusername)
        {
            using (var sha256 = SHA256.Create())
            {
                var saltedPassword = string.Format("{0}{1}", salt, password);
                byte[] saltedPasswordAsBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(saltedPassword);
                return Convert.ToBase64String(sha256.ComputeHash(saltedPasswordAsBytes));
            }
        }

The shortest and fastest way ever. Only 1 line!

public static string StringSha256Hash(string text) =>
    string.IsNullOrEmpty(text) ? string.Empty : BitConverter.ToString(new System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256Managed().ComputeHash(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text))).Replace("-", string.Empty);