We Worship MD5, the GOD of HASH (Skrentablog)
In his article “We Worship MD5, the GOD of HASH“, Rich Skrenta shows some of the good uses for the old and trusted MD5 hash algorithm. So what if it’s cryptographically broken? As long as you know about the weaknesses, you can still use it for stuff that doesn’t need to be 110% secure.
In a way this article ties into the same line of thought as “The Architecture of Mailinator“, in that it emphasises that the perfectness or security of systems and algorithms must be seen in the context of it’s use. MD5 is great and fast and creates a collision only after hashing 2^64 items, in the same way to provide throw away emails that noone cares about after 1 or 2 hours, storing them all in memory in a LIFO is a great way of solving the problem.
Goodness or fitness or perfectness of a thing is always relative to the domain or context of it’s use.
August 17 2007 09:59 am | Geek Stuff
