MD5 Hash Generator

What is MD5?

MD5 (Message-Digest Algorithm 5) is a hash function designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991. It turns any input into a 128-bit digest, written as 32 hexadecimal characters. The same text always yields the same MD5 hash, while changing a single character produces a completely different one.

Example: the MD5 hash of hello is 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592 — the tool above is pre-filled so you can see it live.

Is MD5 secure?

No — MD5 is cryptographically broken. Practical collision attacks let anyone craft two different inputs with the same MD5 hash in seconds, and the Flame malware famously exploited an MD5 collision in a Microsoft certificate. Never use MD5 for passwords, digital signatures or certificates. It is still acceptable as a checksum against accidental corruption, where no attacker is involved.

Common uses of MD5

• File checksums: download mirrors still publish MD5 sums so you can spot a truncated or corrupted download.
• Deduplication and identifiers: a quick fingerprint of a chunk of data in non-adversarial systems.
• Legacy compatibility: older databases, Gravatar avatars and protocols that predate the SHA-2 family.

For anything security-sensitive, use SHA-256 instead — and for passwords, a dedicated key-derivation function such as bcrypt, scrypt or Argon2.

Other hash generators

Need a different digest? Pick another algorithm — each has its own page:

Or go back to the Hash Generator homepage to see all five hashes at once.

Why does my hash not match another tool?

Hashes are computed over bytes, not characters, so two inputs that look identical can still produce different digests. The three usual causes:

• A trailing newline. The shell command echo "secret" hashes "secret" plus a line break, while printf %s "secret" (or echo -n) hashes just the word. Text copied out of a terminal often carries that invisible newline.
• Character encoding. This tool encodes your input as UTF-8 before hashing. "café" is 5 bytes in UTF-8 but 4 bytes in Latin-1, so a tool using a different encoding returns a different digest for the same word. Make sure both sides use UTF-8.
• Stray whitespace. Leading or trailing spaces from copy-paste change the input — and therefore the hash. This tool hashes exactly what sits in the box, byte for byte.

Digest sizes at a glance

Every algorithm has a fixed output length, so a quick character count tells you whether a pasted hash is complete or truncated:

Letter case is only display formatting: toggling Uppercase hex does not change the underlying value, and two digests that differ only by case are the same hash.

Frequently asked questions