• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Build and Reverse MD5 Hashes Programatically

    An MD5 hash encodes a string into a 128-bit fingerprint in a one-way transaction that nets the same result no matter what computer you’re using to generate hashes. I know it’s hard to imagine, but the md5 command will create a hash. There are a few ways people go about doing such things. The easiest way I’ve found is to echo the string into md5, most easily done using a command such as the following, which simply echoes out the word test to the md5 command on a Mac: echo -n test | md5 And the output is a simple hash: 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6 The reason I use the -n is because…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    openssl and Signatures

    A checksum can be used to determine if a file has been tampered with at a later date.  To run a checksum use the following command: openssl dgst -HASHTYPE path_to_file HASHTYPE would then be md2, md4, md5, mdc2, rmd160, sha or sha1.  Let’s go ahead and do a checksum of our smb.conf file: openssl dgst -md5 /var/db/smb.conf You should then see output similar to the following: MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e