SSHA256

SSHA256, which stands for Salted Secure Hash Algorithm 256, is a cryptographic hash function. It is a variant of the SHA-256 algorithm that includes a salt. A salt is a random piece of data that is added to the input before hashing. This makes it much harder for attackers to use precomputed tables of hashes to crack passwords or other sensitive information.

The SHA-256 algorithm itself is a member of the SHA-2 family of cryptographic hash functions. It takes an input of any size and produces a fixed-size 256-bit (32-byte) hash value. This hash value is often represented as a hexadecimal string of 64 characters. SHA-256 is designed to be computationally infeasible to reverse, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine the original input from its hash output. It is also designed to be collision-resistant, making it highly improbable to find two different inputs that produce the same hash output.

When a salt is incorporated into SSHA256, the process involves concatenating the salt with the original input (such as a password) and then hashing the combined data using SHA-256. The salt is typically stored alongside the resulting hash. This means that even if two users have the same password, their stored SSHA256 hashes will be different because each will be salted differently. This significantly enhances the security of password storage by mitigating the effectiveness of rainbow table attacks, a common method for offline password cracking. SSHA256 is widely used in various security applications, including password hashing in operating systems and web applications.