SHA384 Hash Generator

What the SHA-384 generator does

This produces the SHA-384 hash of your text, a 96-character hex fingerprint. Type or paste your text, press Convert, and copy or download the result. It sits between SHA-256 and SHA-512 in length, and it has one genuinely useful property the shorter hashes lack, which is worth a moment below.

It runs in your browser, so nothing you enter is uploaded.

How to use it

1. Enter your text. Type or paste it, or upload a plain text file.
2. Press Convert. The 96-character SHA-384 hash appears, ready to Copy or Download.

SHA-384 is SHA-512, trimmed

SHA-384 runs on the bigger of the two SHA-2 engines, the same 64-bit machinery as SHA-512, and then produces a shorter result: 384 bits, which is 96 hex characters, rather than 512. So it inherits SHA-512's strength while handing you a more compact fingerprint. As with SHA-224 and SHA-256, it is not a plain truncation. SHA-384 starts from its own set of internal seed values, so its hash of a given text is its own value, not just the front portion of that text's SHA-512.

Its quiet advantage

Here is the reason SHA-384 exists as more than a middle size. SHA-256 and SHA-512 share a subtle weakness called a length-extension attack. Because their output is the whole of their internal state, someone who knows the hash of a secret followed by a message can, in some setups, compute the hash of that secret, message, and some extra data of their own, all without ever knowing the secret. That can quietly undermine a homemade authentication scheme built by simply hashing a secret together with data.

SHA-384 sidesteps this. Because it throws away part of its internal state before giving you the result, that trick does not work against it. To be clear, the proper fix for all of these hashes is to use a construction called HMAC rather than hashing a secret directly, but the built-in resistance is a real point in SHA-384's favour, and part of why it is chosen in security settings.

Where it shows up

You meet SHA-384 most often inside TLS, the system behind HTTPS, where it appears in the stronger cipher suites alongside SHA-256. It is the natural pick when you want a higher security margin than SHA-256 offers but do not need the full length of SHA-512. Outside of that it is less of an everyday tool, and for general fingerprinting SHA-256 remains the common choice.

The library doing the work

The hashing is handled by js-sha512, a small JavaScript library that implements the 64-bit SHA-2 engine and provides both SHA-512 and SHA-384. Your text is read as UTF-8 bytes and run through the algorithm in your browser, with the 96-character hex result handed back.

Questions people ask

Is SHA-384 just SHA-512 cut short?

It uses the SHA-512 engine and produces a shorter output, but it starts from different seed values, so its hash is its own value, not the first 96 characters of the SHA-512 hash.

Why pick SHA-384 over SHA-256?

For a higher security margin, and for its built-in resistance to length-extension attacks. It is common in the stronger TLS cipher suites.

Can I reverse a SHA-384 hash?

No. Hashing only runs forwards, so a SHA-384 result cannot be unmade into the text behind it. The SHA-256 page covers why no hash can.

References

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (2015). FIPS PUB 180-4: Secure Hash Standard (SHS). https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.180-4.pdf
2. js-sha512, a SHA-512 and SHA-384 implementation for JavaScript (npm package). https://www.npmjs.com/package/js-sha512