[ILUG] hashing algorithm

Caolan McNamara cmc at stardivision.de
Tue Sep 5 09:25:25 IST 2000


At 08:59 05.09.00 +0100, Smelly Pooh wrote:
>In reply to Caolan McNamara's flatulent wordings,
> > >How do you go about finding out which one(s) your libc uses/supports?
> > >Does RedHat6.2 support SHA?
> >
> > Are you telling me that there is some sort of standardish c library 
> hashing
> > api call ?
> >
>The only Linux libc standard I'm afraid is DES crypt, it is quite annoying
>that a lot of apps re-invent the wheel for crypto functions, however quite a
>few also use openSSL (www.openssl.org)

We talking at cross purposes here, just to be clear on everything, SHA1 
(Secure Hash Algorithm) is a hashing algorithm. They are not intended to 
encrypt something, just to generate a fixed len chunk of data that uniquely 
identifys it. Theres no way back from their hash, theres often a use for 
them in encryption software but something like crypt is not a hashing 
algorithm and neither is technology like SSL.

And vice versa SHA isn't of much use on its own for encryption tech. If its 
encryption Ross wants then thats going to be a whole new ball game as to 
what he wants to encrypt, fixed data, comms data, yadda, yadda, yadda.

C.

--
Herein are personal opinions, you'd want to be crazed to consider
these official positions of StarOffice/Sun or even vaguely congruent.





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