freebsd security - Jul 2007 - slight irritation using digest (from the ports)

Hello Folks!

For a special application I needed to create digests (or hashes) using
the whirlpool algorithem. It was kind of hard to find something that
actually did that. But I found digest in the ports tree - ok, with some
help from someone who seemed to know what to look for. :-)

What irritates me is the Wikipedia-page on Whirlpool:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_%28algorithm%29

There is a chance that the author of the article messed up somehow but
when you are handling sensitive stuff, chances aren't really the things
you want to take.

My irritations in detail:

My zero-hash is the same as the example shown for whirlpool
(whirlpool-2). That's a good sign so far.

My hash for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is: 
72687676756b91ad986f2e56df761b354b748bc20098354b017b924e82cc67ae
059da85f009d1a17c0f12ec0e644c0c3a193f3fc0fee22f053edbfcd95cbf873
And that is nowhere near the examples shown in the article. The same
basic thing applies for the change of "dog" to "eog". My
hashes are
completely different - as in "no chance the hashes were transfered by
typing and a typo snuck in". I've tried changing the first letter to a
small 't' in case the author didn't hash the sentence with a
capital,
but that didn't resolve the problem, nor did adding a full stop. I even
added the quotes to the string that whirlpool digested - didn't change
anything. I know I could try changing the input until kingdom come
without finding the error, so I left it at that.

I could however verify (using a few tests, if you want to call that
"veryfying") that the results were the same on both i386 and sparc64
plattforms - but since the port was taken from NetBSD, there aren't any
surprises in that.

Just to make things a little more complex, I encoded "Telegraph Road"
off one of my Dire Straits CDs to mp3, hashed that with digest and
compared the hash to the result a friend of mine got with Jacksum[1] on a
Windows box. These were the same and Jacksum says the algorithm is
WHIRLPOOL-2 (which is usually named without the number).

This may be only a small irritation but since we are talking about a
security issue, I don't want to dismiss it too easily either. Are there
any opinions to this out there?

Regards
Chris

[1] http://www.jonelo.de/java/jacksum/

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 11:28:10AM +0200, Christian Baer
wrote:
> Hello Folks!
> 
> For a special application I needed to create digests (or hashes) using
> the whirlpool algorithem. It was kind of hard to find something that
> actually did that. But I found digest in the ports tree - ok, with some
> help from someone who seemed to know what to look for. :-)
> 
> What irritates me is the Wikipedia-page on Whirlpool:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_%28algorithm%29
> 
> There is a chance that the author of the article messed up somehow but
> when you are handling sensitive stuff, chances aren't really the things
> you want to take.
> 
> My irritations in detail:
> 
> My zero-hash is the same as the example shown for whirlpool
> (whirlpool-2). That's a good sign so far.
> 
> My hash for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is: 
> 72687676756b91ad986f2e56df761b354b748bc20098354b017b924e82cc67ae
> 059da85f009d1a17c0f12ec0e644c0c3a193f3fc0fee22f053edbfcd95cbf873
> And that is nowhere near the examples shown in the article. The same
> basic thing applies for the change of "dog" to "eog".
My hashes are
> completely different - as in "no chance the hashes were transfered by
> typing and a typo snuck in". I've tried changing the first letter
to a
> small 't' in case the author didn't hash the sentence with a
capital,
> but that didn't resolve the problem, nor did adding a full stop. I even
> added the quotes to the string that whirlpool digested - didn't change
> anything. I know I could try changing the input until kingdom come
> without finding the error, so I left it at that.
I think this illustrates what you're seeing...

wxs@rst wxs > echo "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
> foo
wxs@rst wxs > digest whirlpool foo
WHIRLPOOL (foo)
72687676756b91ad986f2e56df761b354b748bc20098354b017b924e82cc67ae059da85f009d1a17c0f12ec0e644c0c3a193f3fc0fee22f053edbfcd95cbf873
wxs@rst wxs > echo -n "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
>
wxs@rst wxs > digest whirlpool foo
WHIRLPOOL (foo)
b97de512e91e3828b40d2b0fdce9ceb3c4a71f9bea8d88e75c4fa854df36725fd2b52eb6544edcacd6f8beddfea403cb55ae31f03ad62a5ef54e42ee82c3fb35
wxs@rst wxs > 

It was including the trailing newline character in your example.

-- WXS

Hi Christian,

Christian Baer wrote:
> My hash for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is: 
> 72687676756b91ad986f2e56df761b354b748bc20098354b017b924e82cc67ae
> 059da85f009d1a17c0f12ec0e644c0c3a193f3fc0fee22f053edbfcd95cbf873
> And that is nowhere near the examples shown in the article.
You have included the trailing newline in your hash calculation;
the example in the article did not do this:

echo The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog | openssl dgst -whirlpool
(stdin)=
72687676756b91ad986f2e56df761b354b748bc20098354b017b924e82cc67ae059da85f009d1a17c0f12ec0e644c0c3a193f3fc0fee22f053edbfcd95cbf873

echo -n The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog | openssl dgst -whirlpool
(stdin)=
b97de512e91e3828b40d2b0fdce9ceb3c4a71f9bea8d88e75c4fa854df36725fd2b52eb6544edcacd6f8beddfea403cb55ae31f03ad62a5ef54e42ee82c3fb35


Greetings,
Johan
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On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:26:44 +0200 Johan van Selst wrote:
> You have included the trailing newline in your hash calculation;
> the example in the article did not do this:
Richt now I feel a bit like Homer Simpson: DOH!

Great, I could of thought auf that by myself, but once again, finding
the problem was like finding an elephant through a microscope.

Thanks for straightening me out! :-)
> echo The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog | openssl dgst -whirlpool
Did you install a port with an extended openssl or is there some trick
to this? My manpage for openssl doesn't even include sha256, only md2,
md5, mdc2, rmd160, sha (which will probably be sha-0) and sha1. Did I
miss something?

Regards
Chris