Welcome back. So last time we covered some basics on hashing passwords, this time we will get into some code.

What I like about BCrypt.Net, is that I don’t really need to think to hard about what I am trying to do; all of the hard work has been done for me. It provides us with basically every function we could possibly desire, more importantly, it provides more functions than we really need, to the extent that I feel it provides enough functions for you to make a very poor implementation if you so desired.

In the bCrypt .Net we have the following functions available to us, and in my PowerShell implementation, I have made some of these available to us. In case you wondered, here is the list of methods bCrypt.Net provides:

• GenerateSalt
• HashPassword
• HashString – Alias for HashPassword
• Verify

What is the verify method you ask? Well this is a very cool method. You provide the method a plain text string (someone’s password as input on a login form) and a hash. It will then go off and hash the input, and compare the two, returning true if they do. This method does all the work, it can find the workload factor, the salt and do all the comparisons. All so simple and easy.

So what do my CMDLet’s look like?

This is how I have defined by CMDLets:

• Get-BCryptSalt = GenerateSalt
• Get-BCryptHash = HashPassword
• Test-BCryptHash = Verify

Well let’s cover off how we make bCrypt available to powershell. Firstly we need to add the .net classes/types to the PowerShell environment using the add-type cmdlet. For example:

Add-Type -Path C:\files\bcrypt\BCrypt.Net.dll

Once that has been done, we can go ahead and use the cmdlets.

Here is our salt cmdlet:

And hashing cmdlet:

 

And the verify cmdlet:

So, lets talk a little about the simple code we are seeing. See the lines like "[bcrypt.net.bcrypt]::hashpassword($InputString, $WorkFactor)", well what we are doing here is calling the hashpassword method, from the class bcrypt, in the .net namespace bcrypt.net. This is simple, because the method is a static method for the class (if it wasn't, we would need an object instance).

Finally the module:

So let's look at some examples of how to use what we have learnt: