hi all
I am encoding the password to be inserted in the database using following piece of code.
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Dim oEncoder As UTF8Encoding
Dim oMD5Hasher As MD5CryptoServiceProvider
Dim byteHashedPassword As Byte()
oMD5Hasher = New MD5CryptoServiceProvider
oEncoder = New UTF8Encoding
byteHashedPassword = oMD5Hasher.ComputeHash(oEn
'i insert bytehashedpassword in the db in password field which is of datatype binary
--------------------------
I have problem decrypting it.
Can somebody help me. I again want to decrypt(unhash) it to string from binary.
Thank you in advance
With Best Regards
Vivek Phadke
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So there is no way i can unhash it?
Well I am diong the forget password thing. I need to send the user his forgotten password. Although i can generate a new password and give it to him. But then the basic need of unhashing would be defeated. What i feel is the thing that is encrypted can be decrypted provided we have all the keys.
Hashes are used for the verification of values. A hash has a fixed size (for instance, MD5 and SHA1 are 16 bytes AFAIR), independently of the size of the contents hashed. You can hash hundreds of GB into the 16 byte hash! Now, given that you hashed anything large, how would you expect to recover the original contents from the 16 bytes of the hash? It's not possible, or it would happen to be the perfect packing alogrithm *g*...
The point is that these 16 bytes of the hash are very very very very unlikely the same for any two hashed values. If you change one bit, or swap two bytes in the data you're hashing, you get a completely different hash, which does not look anything like the one of the unchanged contents. This means that even slight changes in the contents are reflected in the hash, but the changed hash gives you no clue how much and what has changed in the contents.
So, there is NO unhashing. Hashing is NOT an encryption, but a means to verify data integrity or data equality of an arbitrary amount of data. If you tamper with the data, the hash immediately becomes invalid. That's what a hash is made for.
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by: AvonWyssPosted on 2004-10-14 at 00:33:09ID: 12305735
You cannot unhash a hash. That would defeat it's purpose. The hash is a value which is different with a very high probability for each different string, so that the hash can be used as identifier for that given string. But you shall not be able to revert the hashing process, especially not MD5 and other cryptographic-grade hashes.
But what you can do is hash the password you've received with the same method and then compare the two hashes. If they are identical, you can safely assume that the passwords entered were equal.
The only way to "unhash" is by brute force attack, e.g. try every possible solution, hash it, and see if the hash is the one you were looking for. But this is not practical for longer and secure passwords (e.g. containing at least a digit and some special char like ,.-_* as well as both upper-and lowercase chars, with a length of 8 minimum).