Of course it’s a small article about md5… I really wondered how many Micro$oft Windows users check the md5 sum of programs that they download from the internet…

Do you really trust that much the mirror websites?
Even I could set up a mirror website for any download website and spread malformed packages to include, trojans, backdoors, viruses and so… That’s why many websites give you a md5 checksum of the specific fies…

Have a got a md5 calculation two?
If you’re a Windows users, then I’m not quite sure… while on the other side if you are a *nix user than it is improbable that you haven’t got one of this…

So while coding for myself a md5 calculator I though other users could use it to. Of course there are other alternatives on the net, but I do not really like that GUI shit…

usage:

md5 f file.ext
md5 s string

download on Darknet :: backbones md5 calculator

Mirror 1 Mediafire :: backbones md5 calculator

No further versions will be released…

P.S. for easy access place it in your %WinDir%

md5.zip hash :: 894d6d941cab0c6a3648a5352b6aba11

A paper about cracking SHA-1 originally surfaced in 2005, from a fairly reputable scientific source in China, it was widely publicised nor talked about much.

But then recently, just last month China managed to make a wave out of it, almost 2 years after the initial ‘report’.

It was even Slashdotted on January 20th 2007, the article states the following:

These two main algorithms are currently the crucial technology that electronic signatures and many other password securities use throughout the international community. They are widely used in banking, securities, and e-commerce. SHA-1 has been recognized as the cornerstone for modern Internet security. According to the article, in the early stages of Wang’s research, there were other data encryption researchers who tried to crack it. However, none of them succeeded. This is why in 15 years Hash research had become the domain of hopeless research in many scientists’ minds.

Source: Epoch Times

Bruce Schneier wrote about this in 2005, February in fact, almost 2 full years ago.

SHA-1 Broken

Cryptanalysis of SHA-1

It’s not a major thing though and it’s far beyond anything most criminals could use to thwart national security…or even the security of things based on SHA-1 like OpenSSH.

There are however plenty of replacement algorithms if you are paranoid such as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.