Why is sha1 more safe than md5?

En Español

You aren't signed in
(sign in)

Posted by shahata5 3 years ago

See original question | Add your answer

Answer 3 out of 3

See all answers

shahata5

1 answer

Both

MD5 and SHA-1 have known weaknesses that allow for a reduced effort in finding collisions. A collision is when different inputs results in the same hash value. Since hashes are used to verify the contents of a message, this is bad, because the same hash could mean either message. In most cases simply any collision is not enough to do real damage though - an attacker would need to find one that produces the same hash for both the original content and the modified content while still leaving such content useful (i.e. leaving an executable program code still doing something more or less intended, or leaving a text message mostly intact while only changing certain words/phrases). A hash algorithm is weakened when a method is known that reduces the effort of finding such a collision considerably compared to the brute force method (trying all combinations until you happen upon one that produces the same hash value).

Posted 3 years ago