Question

So I have the user enter password to signup from the android app.

Before I save the password to the database on the server I want to convert it to a MD5 one way hash and save it to the database.

MessageDigest md = null;
    try {
        md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e3) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e3.printStackTrace();
    }
    try {
        md.update(password.getBytes("UTF-8"));
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e3) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e3.printStackTrace();
    }
    byte raw[] = md.digest();

How do I convert this byte array to a Base64 string. I saw in some forum that android util package left out the Base64 encoding and decoding on the other hand I see the encodetoString function in the android developers site.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want your application to be compatible below API level 8, then you can pull in a 3rd part library to handle the Base64 encoding.

Apache Commons Codec is one you can try. It includes a Base64 codec: http://commons.apache.org/codec/api-release/index.html.