I've been looking at the text written by professor Rivest, and I REALLY do not understand the MD5 algorithm.

It produces a 32 bit encryption.. so its 32 characters, no matter what. But you can hash a string with an unlimited amount of characters... But if you do the math, only 9,472,710,129,612,967,086,019,848,437,700,000,000 possible combinations of alphanumeric characters in a 32 bit (character) hash is possible. So how can it account for the rest of the combinations of letters and numbers that you can encrypt?

That being "(32 x 31 x 30 x 29 x 28 x 27 x 26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 x 16 x 15 x 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) * (26 + 10)". 26 letters (A-Z) and 10 numbers (0-9) producable by MD5.

WTF?

You forgot to include (a-z) for a total of 52 letters.

Well.. I just used a-z generically, I didn't know they could be cap'd or not. I thought it just produced them in lowercase.

It only produces letters in lowercase, but it uses uppercase letters as part of the algorithm.

It's NOT encryption. It's a hash. That means that it's not mathematically possible to decrypt an md5() encoded string. MD5() is designed to be a secure way of storting data for authentication, not for encryption. So, yes, a few times the same hash will come up for more than one string. But it's highly unlikely that you'll find more than one, and they would have to be so drastically different that they'd never be used in the same context anyway.

Ahh okay. I'm new to this sort of thing, Thanks for making it more clear to me.

I made a program that implemented the MD5 hash for files if you would like to view it?

lmao.

Might I just bring this down to earth a bit and ask if you don't think that many bafrickingzillion possible distinct hashes will be ENOUGH??

and I'd like to see him store that number in an integer:mrgreen:

You'd need a plugin module like BigfrickinNum from CodefrackingSpace.foo