3 Reasons why MD5 is not Secure

You probably already read that information, and you know that MD5 is not the most secure hashing function
But do you know why? Do you know safer alternatives?
This is what I’ll explain you today.

Why is MD5 not secure?
MD5 is a cryptographic algorithm, often used to store passwords in a database
But this algorithm is no longer safe
Brute force attacks are faster than ever, dictionary tables are big and there are other potential problems with the MD5 algorithm

I’ll explain all of this in this article.

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What is MD5?

MD5 is a cryptographic algorithm, often used to store passwords in a database.
In the early days of the Internet, websites mostly kept clear text passwords in their databases.
It wasn’t a good solution, so developers used MD5 to obfuscate the password in the database.

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MD5 is an algorithm that produce a 32 characters hexadecimal string from any password, phrase or text.
For example, if your password is ‘qwerty’ (bad idea), in the database you’ll have d8578edf8458ce06fbc5bb76a58c5ca4.

That way, IT staff can’t see your password, and if someone stole the database, they don’t get all the passwords directly.
Today, it’s still not immediate to decrypt passwords, but not so far.
I’ll explain why in the next parts, and why you must find another way to store passwords.

Why is MD5 not secure?

1 – Brute force attacks on MD5 hashes are fast

A brute force attack is a way to find a password by trying many possibilities.
Either by guessing what the user could have used (birthdate, the child’s names, pet names, …), or by trying everything (from a,b,c to 10 characters passwords with special characters).

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The MD5 algorithm is fast to use.
So in a few seconds you can try many combinations.

20 years ago, it could take years to find a password for the world’s most powerful computers
Today, everyone has a super-computer at home, with improvements in the processor and graphics processor,  we can decrypt “secure” passwords in a few days maximum.
The best computers can try billions of passwords every second (source: ZDNet).

The only resistance to the brute force attacks are probably the password length.
If you have a 40 characters long random password, with special characters, you’re probably safe for the moment
But for how much longer?

2 – MD5 dictionary tables are big

On MD5Online we like the dictionary tables.
By storing over 1,150 billion passwords in our database, we can give you an answer in a few seconds for any hash
.

That’s the second problem with the MD5 algorithm.
It is so widely used that huge databases like this have been created over the years.
If your password is inside (and there is a good chance if you have a “short” password), your accounts are not safe at all.

As for the brute force method, the only way to be safe is to use a long random password with special characters.
There are too many possibilities to have it in this kind of database.
Database like this are taking a lot of disk space. Even if it’s cheaper and cheaper over the years, it’s still an obstacle.

3 – MD5 has collisions

The MD5 algorithm has also proven issues within its cryptographic method.
A collision is when two words have the same hash generated.
Safe algorithms have a good collision resistance.

That’s to say that you have low chances to get the same hash for different words.
But MD5 has a low collision resistance.

So if you know that “abc” and “def” have the same generated hash (just an example).
You can say that “123abc” and “123def” have also the same hash generated.
And this is a bad property for a cryptographic hash functions as you can guess a lot of derived words.

What are the solutions?

Now that you know why MD5 is not safe, what can you do to improve your database security.

Use salt

The first thing you can try is to use salt while encrypting passwords.
I already wrote an article about this: What is an MD5 salt and how to use it?
Check it if you want to learn more about this.

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Basically, a salt is a word you’ll add before and/or after each password.
If your salt is “randomsaltformypassword” and the user choose “qwerty” as a password, you’ll use “randomsaltformypasswordqwerty” as the MD5 function parameter.

That way you are encrypting a much longer password in your database, and it will be harder for a hacker to find the corresponding password.
Make sure to choose a long salt to improve security enough.

Long passwords

Another solution is to force users to use a longer password (maybe 15 characters or more).
You can also add passwords complexity to make sure they are using uppercase, lowercase and special characters.

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But be careful, people will often use weak passwords, even if you implement all of this.
“ILoveMyCompany!” is a 15 character password with a special character, but it’s easy to guess.
Or even worse, they will note the password on a post-it note near the computer:)

Here is a great tool you can use to generate easy-to-remember long passwords.

Other hash functions

Probably the best solution is to use another cryptographic algorithm.
This is not the easiest because you probably have to change your database structure, but it could be the safest.

I’ll not give you too many examples as if you are reading these lines in ten years it could have changed.
But today, the password_hash() function in PHP seems a good idea (check the documentation).
Or maybe bcrypt or scrypt with a salt and enough iterations are also a good solution.

Conclusion

That’s it, you now know why the MD5 algorithm is no longer safe to use for password encryption
And I also give you other alternatives to improve your database security.

Try to keep up to date with the latest security news, there are new breaches every day, and this article can quickly become obsolete.

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