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Our last, best hope … for message digests?

Posted by: Kenneth Kousen on 06/26/2008

So I’m teaching my course in Securing Java Web Applications (my third one in the last six weeks) and we got to a section that discussed the MD5 algorithm for generating message digests.

One of the students asked, “whatever happened to MD’s 1 through 4?”

I simply couldn’t resist saying, “MD’s 1, 2, and 3 were sabotaged during construction. MD4 vanished without a trace shortly after it came online. Now we have MD5, our last, best hope for peaceful digests.”

To my pleasant surprise, about five different students got the joke.

(And yes, every time I see the abbreviation JMS I don’t think Java Message Service, I think J. Michael Straczynski.)

We live for the One; we die for the One.

Kenneth Kousen's complete blog can be found at: http://kousenit.wordpress.com

About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

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