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Can I use the hexadecimal numbering system to enhance security?

614 Views 3 Replies 3 Participants Last post by oztex, Jul 14, 2021

oztex

Discussion Starter · Jul 13, 2021 (Edited)

I'm a college student, I'm working on my project. I'm working on my file transfer app across which runs with the help of 24-port switches on local area.

Computer networking and network programming is not my main subjects but, for this project, I have learned about it. I have developed my app with React.js in the front-end, Express.Js in the back-end and I'm using mongodb as the database. I have already implemented Bcrypt Javascript library to hash important information on the server.

Along with that, I have also made the Mongodb to response to the request coming from a specific ports.

Security, plays a major role in today's world and to be different from the rest, I have decided to use the 16-bits Hexadecimal numbers to enhance security. I'm going to convert hash data into hexadecimal and then I will hash them. Whenever a user demands the data, I'm going to convert hexadecimal to decimal just like them, and then to hash.

My question: Is using hexadecimal numbers for such reason make sense? I got this idea from MAC address when I found that MAC address also use hexadecimal numbers.

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sbarnhar

· #2 · Jul 13, 2021

This really is a question that belongs on StackOverflow or another type of programming-oriented forum. AVS is mostly about Audio/Video and the various enabling technologies.

But regardless, hexadecimal is in no way a type of encryption and does nothing to enhance security. Binary, Octal, Decimal, and Hexadecimal are just ways of representing numbers in various bases.

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TKO

· #3 · Jul 14, 2021

If you're hashing strings make sure you include a salt value. Like the previous poster wrote, once you have the hashed string it doesn't matter how you pass it around. If you want, you could perform a quick AES encryption using javascript. Public/private keys might be beyond the scope of your project. Remember bcrypt is one way hash so you never get the original string back. You must be storing passwords or something...

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oztex

Discussion Starter · #4 · Jul 14, 2021

I just discussed the same idea with my college professor and she was quite impressed with this idea.

But after reading replies and doing a research from my end I figured out that its not a strong way for protection. Hexadecimal to decimal conversion may seem magic to a student like me but its very easy to convert for any experienced hacker or programmer.

One thing I can do is wired tiger encryption in Mongodb which encrypts all the incoming values before storing in the Database.

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