Intro to Hashing

Hashing is a vital concept in cryptography.



Robert

Staff
Nov. 29, 2015, 3:26 p.m.

A couple things to keep in mind when solving this one:

  • Make sure you're getting the hexadecimal string output from the hash function. That will be the default output of sha256sum and md5sum, but if you use a program like sha256 the output will be raw binary, which needs to be converted to a hex string before being hashed by md5.
  • Make sure you're only using the hash value of the output. Both md5sum and sha256sum will output the hash value followed by an input specifier (either a file name or '-' to indicate stdin). Make sure to discard that part of the output.