Secure Digest Functions

In Cryptography hash functions are used to scramble data.A hash function will generally take an arbitrary amount of data, apply a mathematical formula, and produce a fixed length output which is called as the hash value. Commonly the original data referred to as the message, and the output is referred to as the message digest. Hashing is mostly used as a secure way of storing data.

MD5

MD5 is one of the most commonly used hash functions in cryptography.This function gives a 128 bit hash value as result.The 128-bit MD5 hashes typically are represented as 32-digit hexadecimal numbers.

EAP-MD-5 typically is not recommended for wireless LAN implementations because it may expose the user’s password, and because several collision-based weaknesses have been demonstrated. It provides for only one way authentication — there is no mutual authentication of wireless client and the network. And very importantly it does not provide a means to derive dynamic, per-session wired equivalent privacy (WEP) keys.MD5 is neither encryption nor encoding. It can be cracked by brute-force attack and suffers from extensive vulnerabilities

SHA-1

SHA-1 is the second version of Secure Hash Algorithm standard(SHA-0 is the first).SHA-1 is one of the algorithm that came to replace the MD5 algorithm.

SHA1 is in a hash or message digest algorithm where it generates 160-bit unique value from the input data. The input data size doesn’t matter as SHA1 always generates the same size message digest or hash which is 160 bit. This can be seen very confusing but the algorithm is designed for this.

SHA1 is used for data integrity and security. Especially after 2005, there are a lot of different attacks against the SHA1 algorithm to prevent it is not secure. The first public collusion published in 2017 where SHA1 is not considered secure after that time. Currently, SHA2 family algorithms are invented to be used for security. A collision attack is simply a different input value that can generate the same output hash value which will fake the security systems.