SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1 Hash

What is SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1?

The **SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1** format is a proprietary password hashing scheme developed by SAP for its early enterprise systems, particularly within the **SAP R/3** and **SAP NetWeaver** environments. Structurally, it extends the classic **SHA-1** cryptographic hash function by incorporating a **salted password hashing** mechanism, where the input consists of the plaintext password concatenated with a fixed or dynamic salt (often derived from the user ID or system parameters) before hashing. The resulting hash is typically stored in the **CODVN** (code version) table of SAP databases, where it serves as a secure (or ostensibly secure) means of verifying user credentials. Unlike raw SHA-1, this format introduces a rudimentary layer of protection against rainbow table attacks by embedding the salt within the hashing process, though its implementation lacks modern best practices such as cryptographic salts or key stretching. The primary use-case was authentication within SAP’s legacy systems, where compliance with stronger standards like bcrypt or PBKDF2 was either impractical or overlooked due to performance constraints or legacy codebases.

The **SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1** scheme is critically vulnerable to cracking due to several fundamental flaws. First, while it incorporates a salt, the salt is often **predictable or weak**, derived from system metadata (e.g., user IDs or timestamps) rather than a cryptographically secure random value, rendering it susceptible to **salting attacks** or **offline brute-force attempts**. Second, SHA-1 itself is **collision-prone** and has been cryptographically broken, with precomputed rainbow tables and GPU-accelerated cracking tools (e.g., **Hashcat** or **John the Ripper**) capable of recovering plaintext passwords in reasonable timeframes for short or common passwords. Third, the absence of **iterative hashing** (e.g., no key stretching) allows attackers to evaluate millions of hashes per second on modern hardware, exacerbating the risk. Finally, the **fixed-length output** (160-bit SHA-1) and lack of **peppering** (global secret hashing) make it trivial to precompute and store hashes for brute-force attacks, particularly when combined with leaked credential databases from SAP systems. These vulnerabilities render it unsuitable for modern security standards, despite its historical role in enterprise authentication.

Identifying SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1 Hashes

Identifying a hash blindly is often difficult because multiple algorithms can output strings of the exact same length. For example, a standard 32-character hexadecimal string could be MD5, NTLM, MD4, or LM. To definitively identify SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1, security researchers analyze the hash against a strict regular expression (regex) signature (shown above) to find structural matches.

How to Crack SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1

If you need to recover the plaintext password for a SAP CODVN H (PWDSALTEDHASH) iSSHA-1 hash during a penetration test or forensics investigation, you must supply the correct module ID to your cracking software. Use the exact commands provided at the top of this page to target the hash successfully.