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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

saw a CISSP who didn't know the difference between a SHA256 checksum and SHA1 or even how to hash a file using openssl

I'm relatively deep in this stuff. If you asked my how to use the openssl CLI for anything other than X.509 and s_client I would fail your interview.

Yeah openssl CLI is so incomprehensible. And some parameters have to be configured using .conf files, ewww. The C API is hardly any better.

When I read the RFCs behind the stuff to write what I needed in Rust, suddenly it dawned on me: wow this stuff isn't nearly as complicated and horrible as openssl's interface makes it seem like.

I didn't expect the knowledge of the cli to do it immediately, this person didn't even know they could do it. "openssl dgst -sha256 filename". An answer that they'd need to check the man page would've been sufficient...

Would you have accepted a python solution? I typically don't do this type of stuff using raw openssl on the rare occasion I need it.

I would have accepted even the person knowing and confirming they were aware SHA1 is obsolete

Does anyone have a tutorial on using the openssl cli? It seems to barf on some inputs if it's not exactly perfect or you miss a step in the stack overflow answer.

Honestly I would expect some to be more familiar with the hashXsum tools.

I would expect that. But the lack of knowing the definitions is embarrassing

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