-- Start of PGP signed section. > On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Thomas Koenig wrote: > > > I think we should start moving away from MD5 as our main hash function. > > MD5 has known weaknesses so that an attacker can quite possibly create > > two files, differing maybe in a single bit or in quite a few bytes, but > > having the same MD5 checksum. [..] > BTW: Just curiosity: I would be delighted to see two different files > having the same md5sum. Do you have a simple example?
I'd be delighted to see two files with just a single bit changed have the same MD5 checksum too: given one file of length L, there are only L*8 bits you can change. As an md5sum is 128 bits long, it can take 2**128 values, i.e. significantly more possibilities than you have in flipping bits. So, for file sizes smaller than say 500M Bytes, I'd say you need at least 4 bit-flips[1] to have reasonable a chance of getting the same md5sum back. I don't really believe it's possible get the same MD5 checksum by just flipping one bit. But 4 bits, yes it should be theoretically possible. [1] 500M Byte = 2**32 bits. With those 4 bit-flips, you can make (2**32)**4 combinations = 2**128 = number of different md5sum's -- joost witteveen, [EMAIL PROTECTED] #!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) #what's this? see http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .