MD5-based password algorithm in Python

Question

I try to call API that specifically uses MD5 hash in one of the steps. In the documentation they specifically show example reference that generates MD5 in the following way

$ openssl passwd -1 -salt stack overflow
$1$stack$MVcBmQ3RlrBu5Xoj74NBA0

or to be more exact, they just use the part after the third $

$ openssl passwd -1 -salt stack overflow | cut -f 4 -d '$'
MVcBmQ3RlrBu5Xoj74NBA0

At first, I tried to use hashlib and got the hexadecimal output that does not resemble the exampla at all.

salt = b'stack'
input = b'overflow'
output = hashlib.md5(salt + input).hexdigest()
print(output)

73868cb1848a216984dca1b6b0ee37bc

I figured that I just need to decode those hex values to characters, but decode does not work for default utf8 or for latin1

salt = b'stack'
input = b'overflow'
output = hashlib.md5(salt + input).digest().decode()
print(output)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x86 in position 1: invalid start byte

I found some help here python version of openssl passwd and here MD5 hash in Python

I could reproduce this one with crypt

$ openssl passwd -salt stack overflow
st22n6QiCXNQY

salt = 'stack'
input = 'overflow'
output = crypt.crypt(input, salt)
print(output)

st22n6QiCXNQY

But as soon openssl passwd -1 is added, which stands for

-1                  MD5-based password algorithm

I cannot reproduce it anymore.

How can I recreate MD5-based password algorithm in Python? I would preferably use hashlib if possible.

Answer 1

I found the solution using passlib

from passlib.hash import md5_crypt

salt = 'stack'
input = 'overflow'
output = md5_crypt.using(salt=salt).hash(input)
print(output)

$1$stack$MVcBmQ3RlrBu5Xoj74NBA0

Answer 2

On Linux you can do this with the crypt module. However it will be removed in Python 3.13.

import crypt
crypt.crypt("overflow", "$1$stack")

Here $1$ specifies the use of MD5 and "stack" is the salt.