Re: MD5 on the AS/400

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve,

>MD5 is not considered as safe as the more recent Secured Hash-1 which
>generates 160 bytes of hash.

As you probably know (but for the sake of others, I'll mention it),
the CIPHER instruction in MI can do either MD5 or SHA-1.  One byte in
the "controls" operand selects which hash algorithm to use.  Of
course, the receiver size must also be increased.

>Also, let's say that your program issues a CALL to the MD5 program to check
>some sort of code. Remember that inside programmers with access to the
>STRDBG command can always trace this call and override the parameters in
>order to find out the information.

Instead of doing a CALL to an external program, use the _CIPHER
builtin and remove observability.  This is one of the things I like
about being able to use the MI builtins from ILE languages.  When it
is bound directly into your program, it is much harder to subvert...

Doug
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