01-16-2015, 09:12 AM
Cool, glad that's what it was.
By the way, you're not hex-dumping the base64-encoded string; you're hex-encoding the base64 decoded string. Remember that hashes are binary, so we have to have some way of representing them in a human-readable format. The most common way we do this is encoding with hex or base64.
base64 encoding the raw hash value is common practice with applications written in languages that don't provide a simple hashing API. And oftentimes people feel like if they use an alternate alphabet or remove padding characters that it provides some additional security. It doesn't.
By the way, you're not hex-dumping the base64-encoded string; you're hex-encoding the base64 decoded string. Remember that hashes are binary, so we have to have some way of representing them in a human-readable format. The most common way we do this is encoding with hex or base64.
base64 encoding the raw hash value is common practice with applications written in languages that don't provide a simple hashing API. And oftentimes people feel like if they use an alternate alphabet or remove padding characters that it provides some additional security. It doesn't.