What is MD5?

OK. I will share my notes on MD5.

• MD5  is a 128 bit message digest algoritm. 
• RF1321 describes the MD5
• MD4 and MD5 are replacements for legacy programs that checked transmission errors of digital data such as CRC.
• MD5 supercedes MD4 and happens to be more secure albeit somewhat slower.  This was deliberate to make the code more secure. 
• MD5 is available for both Windows and UNIX platforms.
• You can download MD5 from http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/
• In windows you can just click md5.exe from its download location to install

After downloading I verified the version and usage using the following:

I verified one of the items from the test suite. For testing the program I created a
text file in Notepad with just these two words "message digest" and used it as the input file. Here follows the
result (matches the one in suggested suite).


C:\Documents and Settings\Jayaram Krishnaswamy\Desktop\HodentekHelp>MD5 "C:\Md5test.txt"
F96B697D7CB7938D525A2F31AAF161D0  C:\Md5test.txt