MD4 hash

2006-01-14T07:06:24Z

204.186.210.188: MD4 security update

An [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] hash is a unique value given as a result of a mathematical expression following the [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4 algorithm] which claims to ensure data integrity.<br>
It provides a 128-bit (16 [[byte]]s, 32 hex chars) message digest from the data input (the input may be of any length) that is claimed to be unique.

[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] was developed by [http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest Professor Ronald L. Rivest] of [http://web.mit.edu MIT] and accepted by the [http://www.rsa.com RSA] on [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1186.html October 1990] and then redesigned on [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html April 1992].

Both [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] and its successor [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mabzug1/cs/md5/md5.html MD5] (which is an extension of [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4]) are optimized for 32-bit machines, while its predecessor [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1319.html MD2] was optimized for 8-bit machines.

[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] is known to be fast, but possibly not absolutely secure. On the other hand, [http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mabzug1/cs/md5/md5.html MD5] is not as fast as the [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] algorithm, but offers much more assurance of data security.
: This is a bit out of date, or just uninformed. MD5 is questionable, these days (the currently existing attacks on it aren't serious for most applications, but the door is open for more), and MD4 is known to be absolutely hopeless, and collisions can be found with very little in the way of computational effort. The upshot of which is that it would be theoretically pretty easy for a rogue node to cause undetectable corruption to files on ed2k.

[[aMule]] incorporates the [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1320.html MD4] algorithm based on the [[libcrypto|Crypto++]]'s library sources (in some beta [[aMule]] v2 releases, it did actually use [[libcrypto|Crypto++]]).

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MD4 hash