Online Md5 Generator: Md5 Hash Generator. This MD5 hash generator is useful for encoding passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive data into MySQL, Postgress or other databases. PHP programmers, ASP programmers and anyone developing on MySQL, SQL, Postgress or similar should find this online tool an especially handy resource.
The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a cryptographically broken but still widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It can still be used as a checksum to verify data integrity, but only against unintentional corruption. It remains suitable for other non-cryptographic purposes, for example for determining the partition for a particular key in a partitioned database, and maybe preferred due to lower computational requirements than more recent Secure Hash Algorithms algorithms.[3]
MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4,[4] and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321.
One basic requirement of any cryptographic hash function is that it should be computationally infeasible to find two distinct messages that hash to the same value. MD5 fails this requirement catastrophically; such collisions can be found in seconds on an ordinary home computer.
An MD5 hash is created by taking a string of any length and encoding it into a 128-bit fingerprint. Encoding the same string using the MD5 algorithm will always result in the same 128-bit hash output. MD5 hashes are commonly used with smaller strings when storing passwords, credit card numbers or other sensitive data in databases such as the popular MySQL. This tool provides a quick and easy way to encode an MD5 hash from a simple string of up to 256 characters in length.
MD5 hashes are also used to ensure the data integrity of files. Because the MD5 hash algorithm always produces the same output for the same given input, users can compare a hash of the source file with a newly created hash of the destination file to check that it is intact and unmodified.
An MD5 hash is NOT encryption. It is simply a fingerprint of the given input. However, it is a one-way transaction and as such, it is almost impossible to reverse engineer an MD5 hash to retrieve the original string.