MD5 is a checksum or hash calculation method for files. MD5 checksum consists of 128-bit value which is generally expressed as the hexadecimal format with which consist of 32 characters.
MD5 Attributes
MD5 is a cryptography algorithm which provides some attributes which make it useful for different cases like security, operation etc. Here is the list of MD5 attributes.
- MD5 checksums are 128-bit values
- MD5 checksums can be expressed in different encodings but most used is 32 character hexadecimal.
- MD5 provides Fast Hash Calculation which makes it easy and fast
- MD5 create Unique value almost all unique files with.
MD5 Tools
There are a lot of different tools used to create MD5 checksums. In this part we will list popular of them.
Linux
Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali, Fedora, CentOS, RedHat provides following MD5 checksum tools.
- openssl
- md5sum
- Python
- PHP
- …
Windows
Windows Server and client Operating systems like Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016 provides and use following MD5 tools.
- WinMD5 Free
- CertUtil
- …
Calculate and Verify MD5
In this part, we will create, calculate and verify the MD5 values of example files. We can also use different files like ISO, RAR, EXE etc.
Linux
For Linux distributions, we will use md5 command. We will also provide the file name as a parameter. The calculated MD5 hash will be printed to the console.
$ md5sum exec.c.gz
Windows
In Windows we will use command line tool named certutil . We will provide the file named and hash type which is MD5 in this case.
PS> certutil.exe -hashfile .\Downloads\7z1805.exe MD5
Md5 Alternatives SHA2, SHA256
MD5 is created in 90’s when the IT and computers are not so advanced. During the time the reliability of the MD5 is lowered. Especially from the security viewpoint, it is not accepted as more secure. So alternative Hash Algorithms are developed. In General, we need to use these secure algorithms like SHA2, SHA256 etc.