We’re doing a lot of hashing and validation on our databases lately and I fooled myself into thinking that a byte representation of a str of 0s would be the same thing as a nullbyte * the number of zeroes.

But remember folks, a byte representation of a str of 64 zeroes:

b'0'*64

does not make 64 null bytes:

b'\x00'*64

Let that be a lesson to you!

Code Snippet

# *-* coding: utf-8 -*-
import hashlib
nullbytes768 = b'\x00'*768
print(hashlib.sha3_256(nullbytes768).hexdigest())

Null bytes in Python

Code Snippet