Question

I’m looking for a function that will generate an “alphanumeric hash”. Given a source string, it produces a determinate result string that can contain any letter a-z or digit 0-9, and cannot be reverse-engineered to produce the source. This will be used to generate passwords for a system based on secret data, so strings between 8 and 12 characters are ideal and a secure hash would also be ideal.

I’m thinking I can use a normal bitwise hash, XOR-fold it to 64 bits (if I use, for instance, SHA256) and then take the result 5 bits at a time (producing a number 0-31) and look up the character code to use from an indexed ordered collection. There are 26 letters and 10 digits meaning I’ll have to leave a few out (probably removing characters that could be mistaken for others if handwritten). 64 bits, 5 bits at a time, will produce a 12-character string with 4 bits left over.

However, I’m worried about two things: first, introducing bias by taking a non-power-of-2 number of bits; and second, what to do with the leftover bits. Do I use them as-is knowing there will only be 16 possibilities, do I leave them off (and lose data possibly introducing bias), or do I incorporate one more bit to make a 13-character string (and where should the last bit come from)?

EDIT: Here’s my current stab at it; it takes an enumerable of bytes (like the byte array produced by most hash algorithms) and returns a string:

    /// <summary>
    /// Converts an IEnumerable of bytes to a string representation which can have any lowercase letter a-z except for l, o, q and z, and any digit 0-9.
    /// Uses 5 bits of the byte array at a time to generate numbers from 0 to 31, which are then translated to letters or numbers.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="toConvert">the byte array to convert.</param>
    /// <returns>A string containing the alphanumeric case-insensitive representation of the bytes in the array.</returns>
    public static string ToInsensitiveAlphaNumericString(this IEnumerable<byte> toConvert)
    {
        var chars = new[]
                        {
                            'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'm', 'n', 'p', 'r', 's', 't',
                            'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9'
                        };

        var enumerator = toConvert.GetEnumerator();
        enumerator.MoveNext();

        int buffer = enumerator.Current;
        short bufferLength = 8;
        const int valueLength = 5;

        var builder = new StringBuilder();

        while (true)
        {
            var value = buffer >> (bufferLength - valueLength);

            builder.Append(chars[value]);

            buffer = buffer - (value << (bufferLength - valueLength));
            bufferLength -= valueLength;

            if(bufferLength < valueLength )
            {
                if (enumerator.MoveNext())
                {
                    buffer = (buffer << 8) + enumerator.Current;
                    bufferLength += 8;
                }
                else
                {
                    //here's the main question; to include, or not to include?
                    if (bufferLength > 0)
                        builder.Append(chars[buffer]);
                    break;
                }
            }
        }

        return builder.ToString();
    }

Answer 1

How about generating your SHA256 and then Base36 encoding the result? No left over bits, no bias…

That way you have the cryptographic strength of a proven algorithm (remember to salt and use multiple hash iterations) along with the alphanumeric representation that you need.