In my previous blog article, I described the use of QuickHash to hash password strings for use on the various data breach checking websites. A user contacted me to ask about Unicode characters and whether QuickHash can hash Unicode strings, like passwords that may contains German Umlauts and so on.

Whilst it is not that common for such characters to be used in passwords, they sometimes are, depending on the application. And the answer is yes – QuickHash will generate a hash of a Unicode string no problem. As you can see in the screenshot below, if I type in the password ‘CäsarsRoß’ (which means ‘horse of Caesar’ in German), it generates the SHA-1 hash of 8D0198F022AC1E087FD0D88FAFBBF6BC49A74AA1 which is the same as what the Linux command sha1sum outputs, and also the same as what http://www.sha1-online.com/ outputs.

Hashing password strings with Unicode characters