3 ms·
> Nowadays it would be a complete waste of time to try to improve MD5 Not as a thought experiment. Thought experiments help you to grow.
by TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Nowadays it would be a complete waste of time to try to improve MD5
Not as a thought experiment. Thought experiments help you to grow.
- adrian_b 4y agoI agree about the usefulness of thought experiments, but there are many other much more useful thought experiments, even in the domain of hashes. A large number of people have thought for several years about how to improve MD5, and the results were SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160. It is very instructive to study the evolution from MD4 to MD5 and to SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160, but it is very unlikely that attempting 30 years later to do something better than those, without completely changing a hash algorithm structure that is now well understood as being inappropriate, can teach you anything.
- bombcar 4y agoThe useful thought experiments are often to realize WHY the "trick to fix MD5" you came up with doesn't work.
- bawolff 4y agoPeople are giving you shit, but people thinking about this sort of thing has yielded useful and interesting things like https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/C13-S.pdf https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/C13-S.pdf Of course in production, just use sha256, but there is nothing wrong with thinking about unorthodox solutions.