MD5 ALGORITHM

Aryan Daksh
219301451
History
• Initial checking of integrity –
checksums, then CRC
• These are only good at detecting
lost information due to hardware
or transmission errors
History
• The checksum has no real
protection of data integrity
• Easily circumvented or reverse-
engineered
Potential Attack
• A wants to obtain privileges from B
• A generates two messages with the
same hash values
• A presents an innocent message to B
for his digital signature
• A applies the signature to the other
malicious message with the same hash
Cryptography
• The solution lay in one-way hashing
algorithms
• These should keep two messages from
colliding (having the same hash)
• They should also be sufficiently difficult
to reverse-engineer
Cryptography
• MD5 represents the fifth iteration
designed by Ronald Rivest (RSA)
• Others from other authors include
Whirlpool and SHA
• MD5 is open-source and released
under the GPL
• MD5 is optimized for use on 32-bit
computers
MD5 Hashing
• MD5("The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog") =
9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6
• MD5("The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy cog") =
1055d3e698d289f2af8663725127bd4b
• MD5("") =
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Modern Flaws
• MD5 uses a short 128-bit hash
• MD5 has become a popular hashing
tool through PHP
• PASSWORD HASHING
• Rivest says his algorithm was never
designed for this usage
• Long messages that need an integrity
check before encryption
MD5 Flaws
• Rainbow tables for passwords
• COLLISIONS!
MD5 Collisions
• 2004 Wang et. al delivered an
algorithm that could produce
collisions in a few hours on an IBM
p690 cluster
• Algorithm was improved by
Lenstra et. al in 2005 to a few
hours on a single laptop
Final thoughts
• A digest algorithm does not
provide integrity if collisions are so
simple to produce
• SHA or Whirlpool should be
considered until a replacement for
MD5 can be found