Node & python don't return the same hash256

Question

My NodeJS & Python scripts don't return the same hash, what could cause this issue?

Node.js

const { createHmac } = require("crypto");
var message = 'v1:1583197109:'
var key = 'Asjei8578FHasdjF85Hfjkasi875AsjdiAas_CwueKL='
const digest = Buffer.from(key, "base64");
const hash = createHmac("sha256", digest)
  .update(message)
  .digest("hex");

console.log(hash)
> 7655b4f816dc7725fb4507a20f2b97823979ea00b121c84b76924fea167dcaf7

Python3

message = 'v1:1583197109:'
key = 'Asjei8578FHasdjF85Hfjkasi875AsjdiAas_CwueKL=' + '=' #add a "=" to avoid incorrect padding
digest = base64.b64decode(key.encode('utf-8'))
hash_ = hmac.new(digest, message.encode('utf-8'), hashlib.sha256)
hash_result = hash_.hexdigest()
print(hash_result)
> c762b612d7c56d3f9c95052181969b42c604c2d41b7ce5fc7f5a06457e312d5b

I guess it could be the extra = to avoid the incorrect padding but my key ends with a single =.

Answer 1

Node.js Buffer.from(..., 'base64') can consume the input in the "urlsafe" base64 (https://nodejs.org/api/buffer.html#buffer_buffers_and_character_encodings), and _ is not a valid Base64 character for python, while it is for node.

Adding altchars that correspond to the "urlsafe" version of Base64 to python code yields equal hashes.

const { createHmac } = require("crypto");
var message = 'v1:1583197109:'
var key = 'Asjei8578FHasdjF85Hfjkasi875AsjdiAas_CwueKL='

const digest = Buffer.from(key, "base64");
const hash = createHmac("sha256", digest)
  .update(message)
  .digest("hex");

console.log(hash) // 7655b4f816dc7725fb4507a20f2b97823979ea00b121c84b76924fea167dcaf7

message = 'v1:1583197109:'
key = 'Asjei8578FHasdjF85Hfjkasi875AsjdiAas_CwueKL=' + '=' #add a "=" to avoid incorrect padding
digest = base64.b64decode(key.encode('utf-8'), altchars='-_')
hash_ = hmac.new(digest, message.encode('utf-8'), hashlib.sha256)
hash_result = hash_.hexdigest()
print(hash_result) # 7655b4f816dc7725fb4507a20f2b97823979ea00b121c84b76924fea167dcaf7

Also, python's b64decode has validate kwarg, which would check the input string and "fail loud" instead of ignoring incorrect characters