PHP Variable Encryption

Question

I have the following code that creates an encryption in PHP:

$password = "helloworld";
$passwordupper = strtoupper($password);
$passwordencode = mb_convert_encoding($passwordupper, 'UTF-16LE');
$passwordsha1 = hash("SHA1", $passwordencode);
$passwordbase64 = base64_encode($passwordsha1);

The instructions I have from the system I'm trying to connect to states:

The encoding process for passwords is: first convert to uppercase, then Unicode it in little-endian UTF 16, then SHA1 it then base64 encode it.

I think I'm doing something wrong in my code. Any ideas?

• Marc B: sha1 hash can either be raw binary, or a base64-encoded string to begin with. e.g. $raw = sha1($string, true) v.s. $encoded = sha1($string). you'd better try both variants, because you may be double-base64-encoding.
• NCoder: Perfect Marc B, that did the trick!
• edigu: I strongly recommend using built-in password_hash() method (PHP >= 5.5) instead of hash() us.php.net/manual/en/function.password-hash.php

Answer 1

Answer solved by Marc B above in comments:

sha1 hash can either be raw binary, or a base64-encoded string to begin with. e.g. $raw = sha1($string, true) v.s. $encoded = sha1($string). you'd better try both variants, because you may be double-base64-encoding.