Hashing text with SHA-256 at Windows Forms

Question

String inputPass = textBox2.Text;
byte[] inputBytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(inputPass);
byte[] inputHashedBytes = Sha256.ComputeHash(inputBytes);
String inputHash = Convert.ToBase64String(inputHashedBytes);

I'm getting some strange output:

Q9nXCEhAn7RkIOVgBbBeOd5LiH7FWFtDFJ22TMLSoH8=

By output hash looks like this:

43d9d70828409fb46420e56005b05e38de4b887ec5585b43149db64cc2d2a07f

Answer 1

Encoding.UTF8.GetString parses bytes as UTF8 codepoints.

The SHA256 hash is an arbitrary 256-bit number and does not correspond to any Unicode text.

You probably want to show the binary value in hexadecimal, by calling BitConverter.ToString().
You can also call Convert.ToBase64String().

Answer 2

// this is where you get the actual binary hash
byte[] inputHashedBytes = Sha256.ComputeHash(inputBytes);

// but you want it in a string format, similar to a variety of UNIX tools
string result = BitConverter.ToString(inputHashedBytes)
   // this will remove all the dashes in between each two characters
   .Replace("-", string.Empty)
   // and make it lowercase
   .ToLower();