Decode Hashed Password

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Laszlo Perry

unread,

Aug 3, 2024, 3:43:23 PM8/3/24

to roomsaucharcbig

Hashing works in basic terms, that you take a random string and mix that up (using a certain algorithm) with the password so that it becomes totally unreadable. Then you store this password + hash in a database.

Then how do you know what the correct password is? Well you enter the password and take that same hash string and then you will get the same hash. Then simply compare those hashes and you know if the password is correct.

You can find out what password the user used, but then you need to know what hash string was used to hash it and also you need to know what hashing algorithm was used. Then in the end the solution is still to brute-force the password(try every combination) then hash it and see if it matches the hash that's stored in the database. So for a conclusion, you can "decrypt" a hashed password, but it's not easy.

Let's make it simple : No. Passwords are not meant to be decrypted, what would be the point ? No technique, no utility will allow you to do such a thing. Behind those passwords are huge algorithms meant to be one-way only.

If you want to decode this password then you need to install john the ripper in your ubuntu with sudo apt-get install john. you just need to copy line of that hash code and create a new file with .PASSWD extension and insert that file into john the ripper tool. It will automatically crack those hashes and give you the password of that particular user.

It all depends how the passwords has been "hashed" and what cryptographic algorithm was used, what techniques was used to hash a password and so on. There are dedicated hardware just to crack weak hashed passwords.

Most common way to figure out a hashed password is to use brute force dictionary program to decrypt and figure out a hashed password. This by no means it always works but it is useful.You'll be surprised how many people uses common easy to figure passwords and the brute force dictionary has tons of common passwords which are hashed and it compares it's value with the hashed password to find a match.

Because of this cryptographic developers came up with the "salt" and "pepper" hashing. Basically makes the common easy to guess passwords harder to crack since they will always be a unique hashed password.

Theoretically, decoding or not decoding does not matter, because Base64-encoding is a public permutation (every sequence of Base64 characters can be decoded, and reencoded, by everybody, and this is deterministic). If Base64-encoding strengthen or weakens your password hashing function, and your password hashing function is poor and weak and should be replaced with something stronger.

In practice, some password hashing functions have limitations; in particular, most bcrypt implementations accept passwords of size up to 51 or 55 bytes, no more. Since Base64 encoding increases the data size (every 3 bytes yield 4 characters, reencoded as 4 bytes), hashing the Base64 encoding implies a lower maximum password size. For that reason, it is advisable to decode the Base64 and process the raw password.

However there is also a good reason not to decode the Base64, depending on your support library. If your password hashing implementation uses strings as input, then that code necessarily does some character-to-bytes encoding. This can imply some very inconvenient encoding issues, especially with non-ASCII characters (a simple latin-1 character like "" has several representations in Unicode, yielding different byte sequences). It is important that this encoding is deterministic (when the password is verified, it should use the same encoding as when it was initially chosen). When you receive Base64, then the caller already did the job and presumably agrees with himself. Therefore, it is advisable not to decode the Base64, and instead to hash it directly.

Or maybe not. An alternative view is that encoding issues call for systematic processing, and it may be a good idea to systematically decode everything you receive, to ensure reencoding with the same rules (the encoding rules on the server). This might actually help if the user employs different kinds of client software, with different encoding rules.

So, really, it is up to you. Personally, I would decode the Base64, because I trust me more than other people to process Unicode strings properly, and it avoids artificially lowering the maximum password size in case the hashing function is bcrypt (other functions like PBKDF2 do not have such limitations).

That's up to you, there isn't any less or any more security when it comes to storing those passwords. Kirkhoffs principle dictates that the security of an encryption system should not be compromised if the algorithm falls into the enemy's hands.

So this means that if the attacker knows your scheme, he would not have any extra steps to take care about except base64 encoding the password before trying to bruteforce. While this could mean it would take an extra bit of time to bruteforce the passwords, it's negligeable compared to the overhead of your password hashing algorithm. (providing you took a good one like PBKDF2, scrypt or bcrypt)

In my web app I need user to enter meetingId and meeting password (which for both there is no copy button in the zoom desktop), so to make it easier for user I want to let user copy paste the whole zoom meeting url, then I extract meetingId and password from Url, meetingId is straight forward, password seems to be hashed. I tried base64, and double base64, seems not to correct.

As it looks like this is related to the Zoom Desktop App, I recommend reaching out via our Feedback Form or reaching out to our Customer Support Team to submit a feature request. Those channels will make sure the feature request is sent to the right team.

Unfortunately, we are unable to respond to your open tickets at this time. We encourage you to leverage our Online Resources. If you are a part of a corporate account, and need advanced technical support beyond our Online Resources, please contact your Zoom account administrators.

SHA256 Encrypt/Decrypt is a free online tool for generating SHA256 hashes from strings and decrypting SHA256 hashes to strings. In other words, this tool is a combination of SHA256 hash generator and SHA256 decrypter. SHA256 is a hashing function that creates a unique 256-bit hash with 64 characters long for every string. SHA256 or (SHA-256) stands for "Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit" and it is found by National Security Agency (NSA) in the USA. SHA256 is one of the most popular hashing/encrypting function, especially after reveal of MD5 vulnerabilities. It offers a more secure solution and stronger for collusion attacks.

First, it's important to understand that SHA256 is a cryptographic hash function, meaning that it is a mathematical algorithm that takes a string of any length and produces a fixed-length output. This output is known as a "hash" and is typically represented as a hexadecimal string.

One of the key features of a cryptographic hash function is that it is one-way, meaning that it is virtually impossible to reverse the process and recover the original input from the hash. This makes it a popular choice for storing passwords and other sensitive information, as it is nearly impossible for an attacker to retrieve the original password from the hash.

Here is a representation of how SHA256 encoder decoder works; there are two different strings with different character lengths, both produces unique SHA256 hashes with 64 characters long.

If you use common password list for decryption of your SHA256 hash, it doesn't take much time. But be careful, if you use character sets and combinations, it may take minutes to hours to decrypt a hash and it uses sources of your computer significantly for computation/iteration.

The history of SHA256 dates back to the early 1990s, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began working on a new cryptographic hash function standard. This new standard was part of a larger effort to strengthen the security of computer systems and networks, and was designed to replace the older SHA-1 standard, which had been shown to be vulnerable to attack.

After several years of development, NIST published the new SHA-2 standard in 2001, which included four different hash functions: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. These four functions were designed to be more secure and efficient than the older SHA-1 standard, and were intended for use in a wide range of applications, including digital signatures, data integrity checks, and password storage.

SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function that is commonly used in the blockchain and other security-critical applications. It is used to generate a unique, fixed-size string of text (called a "hash") from a larger input, such as a file or a block of data. This hash can then be used to verify the integrity of the original input, since any change to the input will produce a different hash. SHA-256 is considered to be very secure and is one of the most widely-used hash functions in the world. It is a part of the SHA-2 family of hash functions, which also includes SHA-224, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

Overall, decrypting SHA256 can be a challenging task, but with the right tools and knowledge, it is possible to recover the original password or input from the hash. Whether you are trying to recover a forgotten password or are investigating a security breach, the ability to decrypt SHA256 can be a valuable skill to have.

I had the impression WHMCS is hashing and then salting passwords. If you can decrypt passwords, it means they are not hashed and neither salted. Passwords are supposed to be irreversible in the database.

While I can understand some may require this for a customer login verification, this is unacceptable for storing server logins, in particular when most modules require root logins in order to provision services and a company would have all their server passwords stored in WHMCS since every module, like cPanel, Plesk, etc, requires to set the root logins.