How to use MD5 in javascript to transmit a password

Question

Hi,

I have a jquery dialog modal box pop up for logging into my website. When a user clicks login it does a post request to a login.php file as follows:

$.post(
      'includes/login.php', 
      { user: username, pass: password },
      onLogin, 
      'json' );

How do I do an md5 on that password before putting it in the post request? Also, I have the user's passwords stored in a MySQL database using MD5(), so I would like to just compare the stored version of the password with the MD5 of the password submitted. Thanks to anyone that replies.

Answer 1

You might want to check out this page: http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/

However, if protecting the password is important, you should really be using something like SHA256 (MD5 is not cryptographically secure iirc). Even more, you might want to consider using TLS and getting a cert so you can use https.

Answer 2

Here is a jQuery plugin for calculating the MD5 hash of a string:

Then all you have to do is call $.md5(password):

$.post(
  'includes/login.php', 
  { user: username, pass: $.md5(password) },
  onLogin, 
  'json' );

Answer 3

You could check my md5 hashing function implementation, which also works with 4-byte characters.

Answer 4

If someone is sniffing your plain-text HTTP traffic (or cache/cookies) for passwords just turning the password into a hash won't help - The hash password can be "replayed" just as well as plain-text. The client would need to hash the password with something somewhat random (like the date and time) See the section on "AUTH CRAM-MD5" here: http://www.fehcom.de/qmail/smtpauth.html