Hash identifier with hashcat mode lookup

Hash identification is mostly arithmetic plus prefix matching. Length narrows the field to a handful of candidates; a prefix like $2b$ or $argon2id$ collapses it to one. What identification cannot do is distinguish algorithms that share a digest size - MD5, NTLM, and MD4 are all 32 hex characters - so the honest answer is often a ranked list rather than a single name.

Identification matters because it decides whether the challenge is solvable by cracking at all. A fast unsalted digest means a wordlist attack is the intended path; a deliberately slow function means it is not, and you should be looking for the input somewhere else entirely. Getting this wrong costs hours of futile brute force against something engineered to resist exactly that.

Length first

Prefixes remove the ambiguity

• $1$ - MD5-crypt. $5$ - SHA-256-crypt. $6$ - SHA-512-crypt.
• $2a$, $2b$, $2y$ - bcrypt. The number after it is the cost; 12 means 2^12 rounds and a very slow crack.
• $argon2id$ - Argon2. Memory-hard by design; wordlist cracking is usually not the intended path.
• $pbkdf2-sha256$ - PBKDF2, iteration count embedded.
• {SSHA} - salted SHA-1, base64-encoded, common in LDAP dumps.