Cryptography global variables

Solidity provides cryptographic functions for hashing values within contract functions. There are two hashing functions—SHA2 and SHA3.

The sha3 function converts the input into a hash based on the sha3 algorithm while sha256 converts the input into a hash based on the sha2 algorithm. There is another function, keccak256, which is an alias of the SHA3 algorithm. It is recommended to use the keccak256 or sha3 functions for hashing needs.

The following screenshot of the code segment illustrates this:

The result of executing this function is shown in the following screenshot. The result of both the keccak256 and sha3 functions is the same:

All three of these functions work on tightly packed arguments, meaning that multiple parameters can be concatenated together to find a hash, as shown in the following code snippet:

keccak256(97, 98, 99)