12 Facts About MD5

MD5 message-digest algorithm is a cryptographically broken but still 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.

MD5 fails this requirement catastrophically; such collisions can be found in seconds on an ordinary home computer.

On 31 December 2008, the CMU Software Engineering Institute concluded that MD5 was essentially "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use".

The weaknesses of MD5 have been exploited in the field, most infamously by the Flame malware in 2012.

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MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT.

Bruce Schneier wrote of the attack that "we already knew that MD5 is a broken hash function" and that "no one should be using MD5 anymore".

MD5 uses the Merkle–Damgard construction, so if two prefixes with the same hash can be constructed, a common suffix can be added to both to make the collision more likely to be accepted as valid data by the application using it.

MD5 digests have been widely used in the software world to provide some assurance that a transferred file has arrived intact.

Historically, MD5 has been used to store a one-way hash of a password, often with key stretching.

MD5 is used in the field of electronic discovery, to provide a unique identifier for each document that is exchanged during the legal discovery process.

MD5 algorithm is specified for messages consisting of any number of bits; it is not limited to multiples of eight bits.