diff --git a/RNS/Cryptography/Hashes.py b/RNS/Cryptography/Hashes.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cea0f87
--- /dev/null
+++ b/RNS/Cryptography/Hashes.py
@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+import hashlib
+
+
+def sha256(data):
+    """
+    The SHA-256 primitive is abstracted here to allow platform-
+    aware hardware acceleration in the future. Currently only
+    uses Python's internal SHA-256 implementation. All SHA-256
+    calls in RNS end up here.
+    """
+    digest = hashlib.sha256()
+    digest.update(data)
+
+    return digest.digest()
\ No newline at end of file