The submit_hashes Function

Example:
submit_hashes("hash1;hash2;hash3", "salt1;salt2;salt3", "", "username", "password")
would submit three hashes which have been generated from one IBAN, using three salts which have been generated from the name of the account holder.

Alternative: If you would rather not deal with creating SHA256 hashes yourself, and if you trust us with not permanently storing IBAN and account holder, you can also earn credits by submitting the IBAN and account holder rather than hashes, by using the function submit_iban.

Purpose: If you submit a list of hashes for a combination of IBAN and account holder of which we weren't aware yet, you earn 10 points which you can later use for 10 calls to functions such as validate_iban. To do so, you need to perform the following steps:

• Call the function get_salts to generate a list of salt values from the name of the account holder.
• Calculate as many hash values from the concatenation of the IBAN and a salt value as the number of salts you received in the previous step, using the SHA256 hash function (one hash for each salt). In PHP, you may use this function call: hash('sha256', $iban.$salt); on the Linux command line, you could use the command sha256sum for the same purpose.
  Please make sure your hash mechanism creates exactly the hashes we expect, otherwise the whole exercise would be futile.
  A test case: If one of the salts you received is "61477b49a08f3320dec8390c62fae46337fb52937153a2cd5ee1f326f523ba8c", and the IBAN is "AT131490022010010999", then you need to calculate the SHA256 hash "91b75dbb252fe1b78373b86bb8ed7eed586d349a242aa7835bf0da23289eadee" from the concatenation of the IBAN and the salt, which you can get either by calling

  echo -n AT13149002201001099961477b49a08f3320dec8390c62fae46337fb52937153a2cd5ee1f326f523ba8c | sha256sum

  on the command line, or by calling

  hash('sha256', 'AT13149002201001099961477b49a08f3320dec8390c62fae46337fb52937153a2cd5ee1f326f523ba8c') 

  in PHP. If you use the Linux command line and echo, it is crucial to pass "-n" to echo, otherwise echo will append a newline character, which would lead to a completely different, and hence useless, hash value.
• Pass the list of hashes, the list of salts, and, depending on what we agreed upon when setting up your account as a data submitter account, also the first 10 characters of the IBAN, using the function submit_hashes.
• Our server will check if you are giving us new information, and if so, credit your account with a reward of 10 points.

Input Parameters:

• hashes: xsd:string
  A comma-separated (or semicolon-separated) list of SHA256 hashes which you have created from concatenations of the IBAN to be submitted and the various salts which you have generated using the function get_salts in a previous step.
• salts: xsd:string
  The list of salts you used. If we put an exceptional amount of trust in you, we set up your account so that you can leave this parameter empty. Otherwise, we will use the salts to check that you really used salts created with the function get_salts. We will not permanently store the salts.
• IBANprefix: xsd:string
  The first 10 characters of the IBAN. If we put an exceptional amount of trust in you, we set up your account so that you can leave this parameter empty. Otherwise, we will perform random checks once in a while and perform a brute-force attack to see that the hash you supplied is really meaningful. Such a brute-force attack would be too time-consuming unless you help us by letting us know the first 10 characters, so we only need to guess the rest. We will not permanently store the IBAN prefix.
• user: xsd:string
  The user name with which you log in to iban-bic.com.
• password: xsd:string
  Your password.

Output Fields:

tns:SubmitIBANResStruct with the following fields:

• result: "Thanks" if no error has occured and your IBAN/account holder combination was new to us. Otherwise, an error message in natural language.
• points: The number of points we credited you as a reward for submitting this IBAN/account holder combination.
• balance: Your new iban-bic.com account balance.