Online MD5 Hash calculator
From php.net:
Calculates the MD5 hash of str using the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm, and returns that hash. The hash is a 32-character hexadecimal number.
Information from Wikkipedia the the free encyclopedia.:
MD5 is one of a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1994). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor - MD4 - was likely to be insecure, MD5 was designed in 1991 to be a secure replacement (weaknesses were indeed subsequently found in MD4 by Hans Dobbertin).
In 1993, den Boer and Bosselaers gave an early, although limited, result of finding a "pseudo-collision" of the MD5 compression function; that is, two different initialisation vectors I and J with 4-bit difference between them, such that:
MD5compress(I,X) = MD5compress(J,X)
In 1996, Dobbertin announced a collision of the compression function of MD5 (Dobbertin, 1996). While this was not an attack on the full MD5 hash function, it was close enough for cryptographers to recommend switching to a replacement, such as WHIRLPOOL, SHA-1 or RIPEMD-160.
The size of the hash - 128 bits - is small enough to contemplate a brute force birthday attack. MD5CRK was a distributed project started in March 2004 with the aim of demonstrating that MD5 is practically insecure by finding a collision using a brute force attack.
However, MD5CRK ended shortly after 17 August 2004, when collisions for the full MD5 were announced by Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai and Hongbo Yu [1] [2]. Their analytical attack was reported to take only one hour on an IBM p690 cluster.
On 1 March 2005, Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger demonstrated [3] construction of two X.509 certificates with different public keys and the same MD5 hash, a demonstrably practical collision. The construction included private keys for both public keys. And a few days later, Vlastimil Klima described [4] an improved algorithm, able to construct MD5 collisions in a few hours on a single notebook computer. Given this, MD5 is definitely not practically collision-free.
Because MD5 makes only one pass over the data, if two prefixes with the same hash can be constructed, a common suffix can be added to both to make the collision more reasonable. And because the current collision-finding techniques allow the preceding hash state to be specified arbitrarily, a collision can be found for any desired prefix. All that is required to generate two colliding files is a template file, with a 128-byte block of data aligned on a 64-byte boundary, that can be changed freely by the collision-finding algorithm.