14.2. hmac — Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

Source code: Lib/hmac.py

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This module implements the HMAC algorithm as described by RFC 2104.

hmac.new(key, msg=None, digestmod=None)

Return a new hmac object. key is a bytes object giving the secret key. If msg is present, the method call update(msg) is made. digestmod is the digest constructor or module for the HMAC object to use. It defaults to the hashlib.md5() constructor.

An HMAC object has the following methods:

HMAC.update(msg)

Update the hmac object with the bytes object msg. Repeated calls are equivalent to a single call with the concatenation of all the arguments: m.update(a); m.update(b) is equivalent to m.update(a + b).

HMAC.digest()

Return the digest of the bytes passed to the update() method so far. This bytes object will be the same length as the digest_size of the digest given to the constructor. It may contain non-ASCII bytes, including NUL bytes.

HMAC.hexdigest()

Like digest() except the digest is returned as a string twice the length containing only hexadecimal digits. This may be used to exchange the value safely in email or other non-binary environments.

HMAC.copy()

Return a copy (“clone”) of the hmac object. This can be used to efficiently compute the digests of strings that share a common initial substring.

See also

Module hashlib

The Python module providing secure hash functions.