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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. 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. MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1992). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, Rivest designed MD5 in 1991 as a secure replacement. (Hans Dobbertin did indeed later find weaknesses in MD4.) In 1993, Den Boer and Bosselaers gave an early, although limited, result of finding a "pseudo-collision" of the MD5 compression function; that is, two different initialization vectors that produce an identical digest. In 1996, Dobbertin announced a collision of the compression function of MD5 (Dobbertin, 1996). While this was not an attack on the full MD5 hash function, it was close enough for cryptographers to recommend switching to a replacement, such as SHA-1 (also compromised since) or RIPEMD-160. The size of the hash value (128 bits) is small enough to contemplate a birthday attack. MD5CRK was a distributed project started in March 2004 to demonstrate that MD5 is practically insecure by finding a collision using a birthday attack. MD5CRK ended shortly after 17 August 2004, when collisions for the full MD5 were announced by Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Hongbo Yu. Their analytical attack was reported to take only one hour on an IBM p690 cluster. On 1 March 2005, Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger demonstrated construction of two X.

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