0Pricing
Cryptology Academy · Lesson

MD5: History, Uses & Why It Is Broken

Learn MD5 internals and the collision attacks that retired it.

Welcome

MD5 was once the most widely used hash function. Today it is completely broken for security purposes. Let's understand why and what went wrong.

MD5 Overview

MD5 (Message Digest 5) was designed by Ron Rivest in 1991. It produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash. Output example: MD5('hello') = 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592

All lessons in this course

  1. What Makes a Good Hash Function
  2. MD5: History, Uses & Why It Is Broken
  3. SHA-1 & SHA-2 Family Explained
  4. Hash Applications: Checksums, HMAC & Git
← Back to Cryptology Academy