Hashing data using CryptoKit

So far we have been using CommonCrypto when it has come to creating hashes of data. I even wrote about it some time ago and presented a thin layer on top of it making it more convenient to use. In WWDC’19 Apple presented a new framework called CryptoKit. And of course, it contains functions for hashing data.

SHA512, SHA384, SHA256, SHA1 and MD5

CryptoKit contains separate types for SHA512, SHA384 and SHA256. In addition, there are MD5 and SHA1 but those are considered to be insecure and available only because of backwards compatibility reasons. With CryptoKit, hashing data becomes one line of code.

	import CryptoKit
	let sourceData = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".data(using: .utf8)!
	let sha512Digest = SHA512.hash(data: sourceData)
	print(sha512Digest) // 07e547d9586f6a73f73fbac0435ed76951218fb7d0c8d788a309d785436bbb642e93a252a954f23912547d1e8a3b5ed6e1bfd7097821233fa0538f3db854fee6
	let sha384Digest = SHA384.hash(data: sourceData)
	print(sha384Digest) // ca737f1014a48f4c0b6dd43cb177b0afd9e5169367544c494011e3317dbf9a509cb1e5dc1e85a941bbee3d7f2afbc9b1
	let sha256Digest = SHA256.hash(data: sourceData)
	print(sha256Digest) // d7a8fbb307d7809469ca9abcb0082e4f8d5651e46d3cdb762d02d0bf37c9e592

view raw .swift hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In case we do not have the whole data available in memory (e.g. really huge file), new types support creating hash by feeding data in piece by piece (just highlighting here how to use the hasher with incremental data).

	let dataPieces = ["The ", "quick ", "brown ", "fox ", "jumps ", "over ", "the ", "lazy ", "dog"].map({ $0.data(using: .utf8)! })
	var hasher = SHA512()
	dataPieces.forEach { (data) in
	hasher.update(data: data)
	}
	print(hasher.finalize()) // 07e547d9586f6a73f73fbac0435ed76951218fb7d0c8d788a309d785436bbb642e93a252a954f23912547d1e8a3b5ed6e1bfd7097821233fa0538f3db854fee6

view raw .swift hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Apple has an excellent playground describing the common operations developers need when using CryptoKit. Highly recommend to check it out if you need something more than just creating hashes.

Summary

CryptoKit is long waited framework what is easy to use and does not require managing raw pointers what was needed to when using CommonCrypto. It now just takes some time when we can bump deployment targets and forget CommonCrypto.

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