This repository contains a Python implementation of the MD5 algorithm, which is a message digest algorithm widely used as a hash function for producing a 128-bit hash value.
MD5 suffers from multiple security vulnerabilities such as collision attacks, so it should never be used as a cryptographic hash function anymore. It can still be used as a checksum for data integrity verification.
This is a naive implementation to understand the algorithm, so without focus
on security or performance. For any kind of production software, always use
mature libraries and utilities for hashing, such as md5sum on Linux.
In order to use the code, you need Python 3.9 and Pipenv. Clone the repository and run the following in the root directory to open a new shell subprocess:
$ pipenv install
$ pipenv shell
The command line interface is provided to quickly compute the MD5 hash for a given string. For example, the MD5 hash for the string "Hello world" is computed as follows:
$ python cli.py "Hello world"
3e25960a79dbc69b674cd4ec67a72c62
You can check the correctness using the md5sum utility on Linux:
$ echo -n "Hello world" | md5sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1
3e25960a79dbc69b674cd4ec67a72c62
You can run the unit tests with python -m unittest.
The implementation is licensed under the MIT license. Refer to the LICENSE
file for more information.