SHA-256 operates almost entirely on 32-bit values, because it's designed to be efficient to compute on general-purpose CPUs without special hardware support. Th

SHA-256 operates almost entirely on 32-bit values, because it's designed to be efficient to compute on general-purpose CPUs without special hardware support. The SHA-256 state consists of 8 32-bit integers, of which 2 are updated each round. (SHA-512 uses 64-bit integers instead for some reason.)