Compare result from hexdigest() to a string

Question

I've got a generated MD5-hash, which I would like to compare to another MD5-hash from a string. The statement below is false, even though they look the same when you print them and should be true.

hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest() == "acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8"

Google told me that I should encode the result from hexdigest(), since it doesn't return a string. However, the code below doesn't seem to work either.

hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest().encode("utf-8") == "foo".encode("utf-8")

Answer 1

Python 2.7, .hexdigest() does return a str

>>> hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest() == "acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8"
True
>>> type(hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest())
<type 'str'>

Python 3.1

.md5() doesn't take a unicode (which "foo" is), so that needs to be encoded to a byte stream.

>>> hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#1>", line 1, in <module>
    hashlib.md5("foo").hexdigest()
TypeError: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing

>>> hashlib.md5("foo".encode("utf8")).hexdigest()
'acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8'

>>> hashlib.md5("foo".encode("utf8")).hexdigest() == 'acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8'
True

Answer 2

Using == for a hash comparison is likely a security vulnerability.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/keyczar-discuss/VXHsoJSLKhM

It's possible for an attacker to look for timing differences and iterate through the keyspace efficiently and find a value that will pass the equality test.