A one way cryptographic hash function. Also see “hash functions” and “sha1”
The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321.
| General | |
|---|---|
| Designers | Ronald Rivest |
| First published | April 1992 |
| Series | MD2, MD4, MD5, MD6 |
| Cipher detail | |
| Digest sizes | 128 bit |
| Block sizes | 512 bit |
| Structure | Merkle–Damgård construction |
| Rounds | 4 |
| Best public cryptanalysis | |
| A 2013 attack by Xie Tao, Fanbao Liu, and Dengguo Feng breaks MD5 collision resistance in 218 time. This attack runs in less than a second on a regular computer. MD5 is prone to length extension attacks. | |
MD5 can be used as a checksum to verify data integrity against unintentional corruption. Historically it was widely used as a cryptographic hash function; however it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It remains suitable for other non-cryptographic purposes, for example for determining the partition for a particular key in a partitioned database, and may be preferred due to lower computational requirements than more recent Secure Hash Algorithms.
