Monkeybread Software - MBS FileMaker Plugin: Hash.MD5

Topics All Mac OS X (Only) Windows (Only) Linux (Only, Not) iOS (Only, Not)
Components Crossplatform Mac & Win Server Client Old Guides Examples
New in version: 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 Statistic

Hash.MD5

Calculated MD5 hash of given text.

Component	Version	macOS	Windows	Server	FileMaker Cloud	FileMaker iOS SDK
Hash	2.7	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

MBS( "Hash.MD5"; text { ; Flags } )

Parameters

Parameter Description Example value

text The text to process. "Hello World"

Flags Optional
Various flags you can combine by addition.
Pass 1 for getting result Base64 encoded instead of Hex encoded.
Pass 2 if input data is Hex encoded and plugin should decode it first. 0

Parameter	Description	Example value
text	The text to process.	"Hello World"
Flags	Optional Various flags you can combine by addition. Pass 1 for getting result Base64 encoded instead of Hex encoded. Pass 2 if input data is Hex encoded and plugin should decode it first.	0

Result

Returns MD5 hash.

Description

Calculated MD5 hash of given text.
Text is converted to UTF-8 to make sure the text encoding doesn't change the hash value.
Hashes are used to store a fingerprint of some data. When hashes are not equal, the data is probably also not equal.
This function is good to make hashes for passwords. You don't save the password in your database, but only the hash. On login, you calculate the hash for the password entered by the user and compare the hash with the stored one. This way the database only contains hashes. And it's unlikely someone finds the password given the hash, except for easy cases like "hello" where google will tell you the text for the hash.
To make hashes more secure, use a prefix/suffix like the user id or simply your application name. This way even hello as a password will be quite impossible to recover from the hash.
SHA-512 is stronger than MD5.

Please be aware that text can result in different hashes if it contains line endings. You may want to make sure that line endings are right with the Text.ReplaceNewline function before you compare hashes to results in other development tools. FileMaker uses Mac line endings by default and most examples for Javascript use Unix line endings.

Examples

Calculate hash of password:

MBS( "Hash.MD5"; $password )

Testing flags:

Set Variable [$hash1; Value:MBS( "Hash.MD5"; "Hello" )]
Set Variable [$hash2; Value:MBS( "Hash.MD5"; "48656C6C6F"; 2 )]
Show Custom Dialog ["Two calculations for same hash…"; $hash1 & ¶ & $hash2]

FileMaker 16 vs. Plugin:

# MBS Plugin:
MBS( "Hash.MD5"; "Hello World")
# Same via FileMaker 16 native:
HexEncode( CryptDigest ( "Hello World"; "MD5" ))

Example Databases

Encryption and Hash/Hashes

Created 18th August 2014, last changed 4th June 2017

Hash.Digest - Hash.MD5.HMAC