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…
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Quick and Dirty md5
A hashing function is used to calculate a hash value. If you insert a file into a hashing function then it should produce a value that is almost certain to be unique (there’s always the remote likelihood that no matter how good your function, you may end up with a duplicate). The openssl command is used to access a number of functions/ciphers including sha1, base64, md5, rc4/rc5 and of course des/des3. It is a very simple command to use, simply provide the cipher, followed by the path to the file you would like to get a hash value (aka digest) for. So if I have a file called myfile.txt and I…
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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