How to use OpenSSL: Hashes, digital signatures, and more

The first article in this series introduced hashes, encryption/decryption, digital signatures, and digital certificates through the OpenSSL libraries and command-line utilities. This second article drills down into the details. Let’s begin with hashes, which are ubiquitous in computing, and consider what makes a hash function cryptographic.

The download page for the OpenSSL source code (https://www.openssl.org/source/) contains a table with recent versions. Each version comes with two hash values: 160-bit SHA1 and 256-bit SHA256. These values can be used to verify that the downloaded file matches the original in the repository: The downloader recomputes the hash values locally on the downloaded file and then compares the results against the originals. Modern systems have utilities for computing such hashes. Linux, for instance, has md5sum and sha256sum. OpenSSL itself provides similar command-line utilities.

The link for this article located at Opensource.com is no longer available.