As part of a project I’m working on, I need to support a number of SHA1 hashed & salted passwords created by ASP.NET’s MembershipProvider. I need to rewrite this in Node.js and despite scouring the internet, I’ve been unable to replicate the process.

I’ve been through almost every available post here on StackOverflow along with other resources, including:

• How to check ASP.NET password hash in node.js
• Reimplement ASP.NET Membership and User Password Hashing in Ruby
• What Hash Algorithm used by the Asp.net Membership?
• https://gist.github.com/PalmerEk/1191651

I’ve also spent considerable time digging through the ASP.NET source code to understand the hashing & keyed hashing algorithms, and my understanding is that the code below should be working.

What I’m trying to do is input a plaintext password along with a base64 salt and output the same base64 SHA1 hash that I have in the database. It should be simple. It should be the bytes of the salt concatenated with the bytes of the password and then hashed with SHA1 and digested to base64. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

For example, I have the following known password & hash:

const passwordPlaintext = 'this-is-the-password'
const passwordHash = 'oVj57RdHdLi1rGSx21qnVxj4ewc='
const passwordSalt = '5hz9hys/gdADzfgikgFLYg=='

I should be able to use the following to hash the salt & password:

function dotnet_membership_password_hash(pass, salt, encoding) {
  var bytes = Buffer.from(pass || '', encoding)
  var src = Buffer.from(salt || '', 'base64')
  var dst = Buffer.alloc(src.length + bytes.length)
  src.copy(dst, 0, 0, src.length)
  bytes.copy(dst, src.length, 0, bytes.length)
  return crypto.createHash('sha1').update(dst).digest('base64')
}

However, the outputs I’m getting don’t match up:

// attempted with both utf8 and utf16le
dotnet_membership_password_hash(passwordPlaintext, passwordSalt, encoding)

oVj57RdHdLi1rGSx21qnVxj4ewc= (original)
pCsR7pToO3UiPNmSO8Xr6lqJo/M= (utf8) ❌
AWxwnQ7JDFavjE8jV1J5qkxvKvA= (utf16le) ❌

For what it’s worth, I’ve also tried this with another known password set:

const passwordPlaintext = 'password123'
const passwordHash = 'twEXsCXaU7YnpXyw0vMUjwmVa8E='
const passwordSalt = '0z9kTO9ksSpd4VUCAH9FVw=='

But again, the output isn’t as expected:

twEXsCXaU7YnpXyw0vMUjwmVa8E= (original)
gbUyM/OwMzOCAKRZo42c9Vb8vrA= (utf8) ❌
x5yUPGlqJYOeKuwq4miU7Fwbk+8= (utf16le) ❌

In case it has an effect, there is a validation key in the web.config, e.g.

<machineKey
  validationKey="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
  decryptionKey="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
  decryption="3DES"
  validation="SHA1" />

I’ve tried to incorporate this along with SHA1 into a hmachash function I found on one of the other posts (originally written for sha256) but no luck (didn’t expect much):

const dotnet_membership_password_hmachash = function (pass, salt, vKey, encoding) {
  var key = null
  var bIn = Buffer.from(pass, encoding)
  var bSalt = Buffer.from(salt, 'base64')
  if (vKey.length == bSalt.length) {
    key = bSalt
  } else if (vKey.length < bSalt.length) {
    var bKey = new Buffer(vKey.length)
    bSalt.copy(bKey, 0, 0, bKey.Length)
    key = bKey

  } else {
    var bKey = new Buffer(vKey.length)
    for (var iter = 0; iter < bKey.length;) {
      var len = Math.min(bSalt.length, bKey.length - iter)
      bSalt.copy(bKey, iter, 0, len)
      iter += len
    }
    key = bKey
  }
  return crypto.createHmac('sha1', key).update(bIn).digest('base64')
}

I’m wondering if there’s something obvious I’m missing here, an elementary mistake, and it seems like something quite self-contained that some folks might enjoy having a go at. ChatGPT definitely can’t solve it so it’s down to good old fashioned human programmers!

Looking forward to hearing back.