… And Today I Learned Something Cool About OpenSSL

Maybe most of you reading this knew this but I have to admit that I did not. I was reading the WEB SECURITY TESTING COOKBOOK by Paco Hope and Ben Walther and came across a snippet of code where they show that you can use openssl to generate a Base64-encoded blob of data.

I did not know that you could do this with OpenSSL. I also didn’t know that it could do a lot more than that in the encoding/decoding realm.

Check it out:

Decoding a Base64-encoded string

This is why I love using Linux when testing systems. A simple command line can be used over and over again to perform various tasks. Multi-use is key here.

So, let’s say you come across a Base64-encoded blob of data and you want to decode it. Sure, there are plenty of online decoders out there.

Let’s say the blob of data is:

QWRtaW5pc3RyYXRvcjpwYXNzd2QK

Let’s decode this using openssl:

user@host:~#  echo “QWRtaW5pc3RyYXRvcjpwYXNzd2QK” | openssl base64 –d

What do you get?

“Administrator:passwd”

Congratulations! You’ve successfully decoded a username/password pair.

Encoding a Base64-encoded string

Now, let’s say you wanted to be able to manipulate a base64-encoded blob of data and substitute your own information into it. This would entail you encoding your data for insertion. OpenSSL helps there, too.

Let’s say, instead of the username/password pair we discovered up above, we wanted to somehow include our own in that blob of data. Let’s say we wanted to take “Charlie:Winning” into the blob and we need to base64-encode it.

Our data:

“Charlie:Winning”

Encoding it:

user@host:~#  echo “Charlie:Winning” | openssl base64 –e

It will return the following:

Q2hhcmxpZTpXaW5uaW5nCg

We can then paste this into wherever we’re using that base64-encoded data and we’re ready to rock.

Generating  Hashes

Now, let’s say you wanted to be able to generate an MD5 hash of a value, for use in web testing. If you had a value (let’s say “Charlie:Winning” again … ) and you needed to calculate an MD5 hash of that value to append to a string being submitted to a web server, you can accomplish this with OpenSSL, as well.

Generating  an MD5 Hash

Our value:

“Charlie:Winning”

Our command to generate an MD5 hash from it:

user@host:~#  echo “Charlie:Winning” | openssl dgst –md5

The result:

428a9b9b18360150aadfe3480189a1f8

Generating  a SHA-1 Hash

You can use the same command, changing the digest being used (from –md5 to –sha1) to generate a SHA-1 hash.

Our value:

“Charlie:Winning”

Our command to generate an MD5 hash from it:

user@host:~#  echo “Charlie:Winning” | openssl dgst –sha1

The result:

23d7fc7c0819c20d0e83d88bb142537e8f87cc6c

Conclusion

OpenSSL has a thousand different uses and you should try to become as familiar with it as you can. I never realized how many cool things it can do and was always looking around for different tools to perform all these functions above.

Now I know I don’t need all those tools. I’ve got one tool that handles all of that for me.