WEB ONLINE CENTER - ONE STEP SOLUTION FOR ALL...

MD5 Generator

MD5 Generator tool is used to generate MD5 hash of the given string. MD stands for Message Digest in MD5. It converts a string into complex one. The generated hash cannot be decrypted back to original. This can be used to generate & store passwords in database. Enter the string in the given box & click on Submit button to generate the MD5 hash of any string.

Other Information

The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It can still be used as a checksum to verify data integrity, but only against unintentional corruption.

One basic requirement of any cryptographic hash function is that it should be computationally infeasible to find two non-identical messages which hash to the same value. MD5 fails this requirement catastrophically; such collisions can be found in seconds on an ordinary home computer.

The weaknesses of MD5 have been exploited in the field, most infamously by the Flame malware in 2012. The CMU Software Engineering Institute considers MD5 essentially "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use".

MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321

The security of the MD5 hash function is severely compromised. A collision attack exists that can find collisions within seconds on a computer with a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor (complexity of 224.1). Further, there is also a chosen-prefix collision attack that can produce a collision for two inputs with specified prefixes within hours, using off-the-shelf computing hardware (complexity 239). The ability to find collisions has been greatly aided by the use of off-the-shelf GPUs. On an NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics processor, 16–18 million hashes per second can be computed. An NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra can calculate more than 200 million hashes per second.

These hash and collision attacks have been demonstrated in the public in various situations, including colliding document files and digital certificates. As of 2015, MD5 was demonstrated to be still quite widely used, most notably by security research and antivirus companies.

In 1996, a flaw was found in the design of MD5. While it was not deemed a fatal weakness at the time, cryptographers began recommending the use of other algorithms, such as SHA-1, which has since been found to be vulnerable as well. In 2004 it was shown that MD5 is not collision-resistant. As such, MD5 is not suitable for applications like SSL certificates or digital signatures that rely on this property for digital security. Also in 2004 more serious flaws were discovered in MD5, making further use of the algorithm for security purposes questionable; specifically, a group of researchers described how to create a pair of files that share the same MD5 checksum. Further advances were made in breaking MD5 in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In December 2008, a group of researchers used this technique to fake SSL certificate validity.

As of 2010, the CMU Software Engineering Institute considers MD5 "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use", and most U.S. government applications now require the SHA-2 family of hash functions. In 2012, the Flame malware exploited the weaknesses in MD5 to fake a Microsoft digital signature.

MD5 uses the Merkle–Damgård 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. Furthermore, current collision-finding techniques allow to specify an arbitrary prefix: an attacker can create two colliding files that both begin with the same content. All the attacker needs to generate two colliding files is a template file with a 128-byte block of data, aligned on a 64-byte boundary that can be changed freely by the collision-finding algorithm.

MD5 digests have been widely used in the software world to provide some assurance that a transferred file has arrived intact. For example, file servers often provide a pre-computed MD5 (known as md5sum) checksum for the files, so that a user can compare the checksum of the downloaded file to it. Most unix-based operating systems include MD5 sum utilities in their distribution packages; Windows users may use the included PowerShell function "Get-FileHash", install a Microsoft utility, or use third-party applications. Android ROMs also use this type of checksum.

As it is easy to generate MD5 collisions, it is possible for the person who created the file to create a second file with the same checksum, so this technique cannot protect against some forms of malicious tampering. In some cases, the checksum cannot be trusted (for example, if it was obtained over the same channel as the downloaded file), in which case MD5 can only provide error-checking functionality: it will recognize a corrupt or incomplete download, which becomes more likely when downloading larger files.

Historically, MD5 has been used to store a one-way hash of a password, often with key stretching. NIST does not include MD5 in their list of recommended hashes for password storage.

MD5 is also used in the field of electronic discovery, in order to provide a unique identifier for each document that is exchanged during the legal discovery process. This method can be used to replace the Bates stamp numbering system that has been used for decades during the exchange of paper documents. As above, this usage should be discouraged due to the ease of collision attacks.

MD5 processes a variable-length message into a fixed-length output of 128 bits. The input message is broken up into chunks of 512-bit blocks (sixteen 32-bit words); the message is padded so that its length is divisible by 512. The padding works as follows: first a single bit, 1, is appended to the end of the message. This is followed by as many zeros as are required to bring the length of the message up to 64 bits fewer than a multiple of 512. The remaining bits are filled up with 64 bits representing the length of the original message, modulo 264.

The main MD5 algorithm operates on a 128-bit state, divided into four 32-bit words, denoted A, B, C, and D. These are initialized to certain fixed constants. The main algorithm then uses each 512-bit message block in turn to modify the state. The processing of a message block consists of four similar stages, termed rounds; each round is composed of 16 similar operations based on a non-linear function F, modular addition, and left rotation

The 128-bit (16-byte) MD5 hashes (also termed message digests) are typically represented as a sequence of 32 hexadecimal digits.

The MD5 algorithm is specified for messages consisting of any number of bits; it is not limited to multiples of eight bit (octets, bytes). Some MD5 implementations such as md5sum might be limited to octets, or they might not support streaming for messages of an initially undetermined length.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/