How to hash a string in Android?

I am working on an Android app and have a couple strings that I would like to encrypt before sending to a database. I'd like something that's secure, easy to implement, will generate the same thing every time it's passed the same data, and preferably will result in a string that stays a constant length no matter how large the string being passed to it is. Maybe I'm looking for a hash.

Solution 1:

This snippet calculate md5 for any given string

public String md5(String s) {
    try {
        // Create MD5 Hash
        MessageDigest digest = java.security.MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
        digest.update(s.getBytes());
        byte messageDigest[] = digest.digest();

        // Create Hex String
        StringBuffer hexString = new StringBuffer();
        for (int i=0; i<messageDigest.length; i++)
            hexString.append(Integer.toHexString(0xFF & messageDigest[i]));
        return hexString.toString();

    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return "";
}

Source: http://www.androidsnippets.com/snippets/52/index.html

Hope this is useful for you

Solution 2:

That function above from (http://www.androidsnippets.org/snippets/52/index.html) is flawed. If one of the digits in the messageDigest is not a two character hex value (i.e. 0x09), it doesn't work properly because it doesn't pad with a 0. If you search around you'll find that function and complaints about it not working. Here a better one found in the comment section of this page, which I slightly modified:

public static String md5(String s) 
{
    MessageDigest digest;
    try
    {
        digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
        digest.update(s.getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")),0,s.length());
        byte[] magnitude = digest.digest();
        BigInteger bi = new BigInteger(1, magnitude);
        String hash = String.format("%0" + (magnitude.length << 1) + "x", bi);
        return hash;
    }
    catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e)
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return "";
}