hashlib — Secure hashes and message digests¶

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.

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.

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()
b'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()
b'cc4a5ce1b3df48aec5d22d1f16b894a0b894eccc'

The following values are provided as constant attributes of the hash objects returned by the constructors:

hashlib.digest_size¶

The size of the resulting hash in bytes.

hashlib.block_size¶

The internal block size of the hash algorithm in bytes.

A hash object has the following methods:

hash.update(arg)¶

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).

hash.digest()¶

Return the digest of the data passed to the update() method so far. This is a bytes array of size digest_size which may contain bytes in the whole range from 0 to 255.

hash.hexdigest()¶

Like digest() except the digest is returned as a string object of double length, containing only hexadecimal digits. This may be used to exchange the value safely in email or other non-binary environments.

hash.copy()¶

Return a copy (“clone”) of the hash object. This can be used to efficiently compute the digests of data sharing a common initial substring.