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Message Digest (MD5) Algorithm and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA)

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Encyclopedia of Multimedia
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Definition:Message Digest and Secure Cash are the standard algorithms to provide data security for multimedia authentication.

The MD5 algorithm takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit “fingerprint” or “message digest” of the input message [1]. MD5 is currently a standard, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF Request for Comments (RFC 1321. In comparison, MD5 is not quite as fast as the MD4 algorithm, but offers much more assurance of data security.

SHA is considered to be the successor to MD5. The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 180-2) specifies four secure hash algorithms (SHA) — SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 [2]. As shown in Table 1, all four of the algorithms are iterative, one-way hash functions that can process a message with a maximum length of 264- to 2128-bits to produce a 160- to 512-bit condensed representation called a message digest. The input message is processed in 512- to 1024-bit blocks. The four algorithms...

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References

  1. R.L. Rivest, “RFC 1321: The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm,” Internet Activities Board, 1992.

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  2. National Institute of Standards and Technology, “Specifications for Digital Signature Standard,” Technical Report NIST FIPS PUB 180-2, Department of Commerce, August 2002.

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© 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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(2006). Message Digest (MD5) Algorithm and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA). In: Furht, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Multimedia. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30038-4_127

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