SHA-256

SHA-256 is a member of the SHA-2 family standardised in FIPS 180-4. It produces a 256-bit digest and has no known practical collision attack. SHA-256 is the default hash for TLS certificate signatures, code signing, Bitcoin proof-of-work, Git's planned object hash transition, and most modern HMAC and KDF constructions. For password storage it should always be wrapped in a slow KDF (bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2, PBKDF2), never used raw, because its speed makes brute force trivial for short inputs.