[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Still.. that has nothing to do with how well known MD5 is (so I stand by my point).
Was not trying to refute your point. Just pointing something out with regards to the "security" of MD5 hashes, and what being "well known" or at least popular does for you. What you say is true...and at the end of the day locks only keep honest people out... (but something like this could be a decent way to check for strength of passwords..)
-B
All these databases are is a giant list of pre-MD5'd strings.  Brute force 
stuff, no magic behind it that allows for reversing MD5. You could technically 
do that with just about any crypto or hashing system.  Just happens that MD5 is 
one that's been focused on and more complicated systems would require 
exponentially more variables in what you'd have to enter.   For instance, you 
could do this with PGP, but I'm guessing you'd have to have at least two pass 
phrases and how many things go into generating the public and private keys, 
plus the message/file that was encrypted.  So for one short text string, you 
could possibly have a database as large as all the MD5 projects put together... 
but you could potentially do the same thing.   At that point it's highly 
prohibitive though.

I got the idea that MD5 really wasn't what he was looking for anyway, so going 
into detail about the security of it didn't seem fruitful.  I talk too much as 
it is. hah

This is a good point though.  MD5 isn't great security, particuarly with the 
databases like the one you mentioned, but most of us aren't storing national 
security documents.   As with security since the dawn of time, it's all a 
matter of how valuable is what you're protecting versus the cost of 
implementing a protection scheme.   7-11 doesn't hire secret service to protect 
against midnight robberies.

-TG



= = = Original message = = =

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
So the fact that MD5 is a well known algorithm doesn't really make a difference as far as security goes.
Except for the fact of the growing number of databases that will map the hashes back to the clear text (for example: http://md5.benramsey.com/) Of course it is nice because it is a common implementation, and can be done on the server side, as well as the client side.




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