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What kind of hash is this?


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A 36 character one? –  Joe Sep 29 '09 at 8:23
Stop upvoting this comment, it's a 26 character "hash", encoded in base64 ;-) –  Michael Krelin - hacker Sep 29 '09 at 9:04
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closed as too localized by CodesInChaos, DocMax, bmargulies, mu is too short, Tyler Crompton Jan 9 '13 at 2:42


3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Doesn't look like hash to me. It's a base64-encoding of 26 bytes of data:

$ echo 'Y16T+T/2sBhrDvaA9MBGGeh9D0pJVpkihCw=' | base64 -d |xxd
0000000: 635e 93f9 3ff6 b018 6b0e f680 f4c0 4619  c^..?...k.....F.
0000010: e87d 0f4a 4956 9922 842c                 .}.JIV.".,
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I also checked to see whether the decoded bytes expanded to anything more interesting with zlib, but it doesn't appear to be gz-compressed –  Paul Dixon Sep 29 '09 at 8:46
Heh, Paul, I've tried to pipe it into file - and it didn't see anything but "data" either ;-) –  Michael Krelin - hacker Sep 29 '09 at 8:55
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I doubt that's actually a hash. It looks like base64 to me, which is an encoding. It's a slight technicality, but encoding's can be reversed easily, hash's can't.

EDIT: Running it through a base64 decoder, it's binary data (if it is infact a base64 encoded string). I believe it is though, the '=' on the end is a giveaway, and the rest of the string conforms to base64 too.

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It might have been base64-encoded hash, but I don't know 26-bytes hash... –  Michael Krelin - hacker Sep 29 '09 at 8:27
A 208bit hash would be highly unussual. –  Matthew Scharley Sep 29 '09 at 8:33
We have no evidence it's a hash, anyway. –  Michael Krelin - hacker Sep 29 '09 at 8:35
No real proof it's base64 either, other than that it decodes fine, but into binary data. That in itself might disprove it to some people, depending on where it came from in the first place. –  Matthew Scharley Sep 29 '09 at 8:49
And the Rosetta stone has the fact it's interesting going for it too. –  Matthew Scharley Sep 29 '09 at 9:07
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It's no hash. It's Base64 encoding. The trailing = is usually a good indicator that it's Base64.

The contents of the decoded text are pretty much gibberish, though.

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