SHA-384 is a cryptographic hash function that produces a fixed-size output of 384 bits. It is part of the SHA-2 family, which was designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) to enhance security over its predecessor, SHA-1. SHA-384 is commonly used in various security applications and protocols, including digital signatures and certificate generation. The function takes an input of any size and generates a unique hash value, making it useful for data integrity verification. Due to its longer output, SHA-384 offers a higher level of security against collision attacks, where two different inputs produce the same hash value.