Generate HMAC-SHA256 hash with BouncyCastle

Question

I need to generate a HMAC-SHA256 hash in a PCL (developing for Xamarin Forms) which doesn't support the .NET built-in HMAC/cryptography classes, so I'm working with BouncyCastle to implement my cryptography classes.

I need to generate a HMAC-SHA256 hash, but I haven't been able to find any example on Google, nor does BouncyCastle seem to have any documentation for this. Can anyone help me out?

Answer 1

Thanks to the solution here I came up with this code:

public class HmacSha256
{
    public byte[] Hash(string text, string key)
    {
        var hmac = new HMac(new Sha256Digest());
        hmac.Init(new KeyParameter(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(key)));
        byte[] result = new byte[hmac.GetMacSize()];
        byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text);

        hmac.BlockUpdate(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
        hmac.DoFinal(result, 0);

        return result;
    }
}

Corresponding unit test (uses FluentAssertions):

[TestClass]
public class HmacSha256Tests
{
    private readonly HmacSha256 _hmac = new HmacSha256();

    [TestMethod]
    public void Hash_GeneratesValidHash_ForInput()
    {
        // Arrange
        string input = "hello";
        string key = "test";
        string expected = "F151EA24BDA91A18E89B8BB5793EF324B2A02133CCE15A28A719ACBD2E58A986";

        // Act
        byte[] output = _hmac.Hash(input, key);

        string outputHex = BitConverter.ToString(output).Replace("-", "").ToUpper();

        // Assert
        expected.Should().Be(outputHex);
    }
}

Answer 2

Using this PCL offshoot of BouncyCastle https://www.nuget.org/packages/BouncyCastle-PCL/1.0.0.6 it's really easy, in fact identical to the windows api.

 public string ComputeHMAC(string message)
    {
        var keyBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Constants.API_KEY);
        var messageBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message);

        var hmac = new HMACSHA256(keyBytes);
        byte[] result = hmac.ComputeHash(messageBytes);

        return Convert.ToBase64String(result);
    }

And a unit test using the actual .Net version:

[Test, AutoMoqData]
    public void Hash_Algorithm_Correct (
        [NoAutoProperties] HashMacService sut,
        string message)
    {
        string expected;

        var key = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Constants.API_KEY);

        using (var hmac = new HMACSHA256(key))
        {
            var hash = hmac.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message));
            expected = Convert.ToBase64String(hash);
        }

        var result = sut.ComputeHMAC(message);

        Assert.That(result, Is.EqualTo(expected));
    }

I was using PCLCrypto but it kept crashing on Xamarin iOS, this was much cleaner and could be unit tested, wheras PCLCrypto required the platform apis so had to be deployed to a device.