About the Whirlpool Hash Generator
Whirlpool is a 512-bit hash designed by Vincent Rijmen (co-author of AES) and Paulo Barreto, built on a modified AES cipher. It is part of the ISO/IEC 10118-3 standard and appears in some encryption software and integrity tools as an alternative to the SHA family. This tool computes it locally, producing 128 hexadecimal characters.
Because it is built from a block cipher in Miyaguchi-Preneel mode rather than from a purpose-made compression function, Whirlpool inherits the wide-trail design that makes AES resistant to differential and linear cryptanalysis. There have been three revisions since 1998, and the current one, sometimes written Whirlpool-T or Whirlpool-3, is what this tool computes. Digests produced by the two earlier drafts will not match, though any modern library ships the current version.
You are most likely to meet it in TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt volume headers, in a few GNU utilities, and in the ISO specification itself. It is a reasonable choice when a specification names it and an awkward one otherwise, mainly because support is patchy: several mainstream languages have no Whirlpool in their standard library at all, so a checksum in this format can be hard to verify on the receiving end. It has no known practical attacks and offers a large digest, but it is slower and less widely supported than SHA-2, so it is a specialist rather than a default choice. Output is hex or Base64; for an equally long digest with universal support, use SHA-512.
How to use
- Paste text.
- Choose the output format.
- Copy the Whirlpool hash.
Common questions
- What is Whirlpool based on?
- A modified version of the AES block cipher, by one of AES's own designers.
- Is it secure?
- No practical attacks are known. It is less common than SHA-2 and slower.
- How long is the hash?
- 512 bits, or 128 hexadecimal characters.