This module implements a common interface to many different secure hash and message digest algorithms. Included are the FIPS secure hash algorithms SHA1, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, and SHA512 (defined in FIPS 180-2) as well as RSA’s MD5 algorithm (defined in Internet RFC 1321). The terms “secure hash” and “message digest” are interchangeable. Older algorithms were called message digests. The modern term is secure hash.
Note
If you want the adler32 or crc32 hash functions they are available in the zlib module.
Warning
Some algorithms have known hash collision weaknesses, see the FAQ at the end.
There is one constructor method named for each type of hash. All return a hash object with the same simple interface. For example: use sha1() to create a SHA1 hash object. You can now feed this object with objects conforming to the buffer interface (normally bytes objects) using the update() method. At any point you can ask it for the digest of the concatenation of the data fed to it so far using the digest() or hexdigest() methods.
Note
For better multithreading performance, the Python GIL is released for strings of more than 2047 bytes at object creation or on update.
Note
Feeding string objects is to update() is not supported, as hashes work on bytes, not on characters.
Constructors for hash algorithms that are always present in this module are md5(), sha1(), sha224(), sha256(), sha384(), and sha512(). Additional algorithms may also be available depending upon the OpenSSL library that Python uses on your platform.
For example, to obtain the digest of the byte string b'Nobody inspects the spammish repetition':
>>> import hashlib
>>> m = hashlib.md5()
>>> m.update(b"Nobody inspects")
>>> m.update(b" the spammish repetition")
>>> m.digest()
b'\xbbd\x9c\x83\xdd\x1e\xa5\xc9\xd9\xde\xc9\xa1\x8d\xf0\xff\xe9'
>>> m.digest_size
16
>>> m.block_size
64
More condensed:
>>> hashlib.sha224(b"Nobody inspects the spammish repetition").hexdigest()
'a4337bc45a8fc544c03f52dc550cd6e1e87021bc896588bd79e901e2'
A generic new() constructor that takes the string name of the desired algorithm as its first parameter also exists to allow access to the above listed hashes as well as any other algorithms that your OpenSSL library may offer. The named constructors are much faster than new() and should be preferred.
Using new() with an algorithm provided by OpenSSL:
>>> h = hashlib.new('ripemd160')
>>> h.update(b"Nobody inspects the spammish repetition")
>>> h.hexdigest()
'cc4a5ce1b3df48aec5d22d1f16b894a0b894eccc'
The following values are provided as constant attributes of the hash objects returned by the constructors:
A hash object has the following methods:
Update the hash object with the object arg, which must be interpretable as a buffer of bytes. Repeated calls are equivalent to a single call with the concatenation of all the arguments: m.update(a); m.update(b) is equivalent to m.update(a+b).
Changed in version 3.1.
See also