MessageDigest hashes differently on different machines

Question

I\'m having a problem with MessageDigest returning different hash values on different computers.

One computer is running 32-bit Java on Windows Vista and the other is ru

Answer 1

Encodings are causing you problems. First here:

saltPlusPlainTextPassword.getBytes()

That will use the default encoding for the machine. Bad idea. Specify "UTF-8" as a simple solution. (It's guaranteed to be present.)

Next this causes issues:

String hashed = new String(hashedByteArray);

hashedByteArray is arbitrary binary data. To safely convert it to text, either use a base-64 encoding or just hex. Again, you're currently using the default encoding, which will vary from machine to machine. There are loads of 3rd party libraries for base64 encoding in Java.