Talk:MD4

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Info about the 1991 paper that broke MD4 was found at: http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/3-6-6.html RedWolf 05:37, Apr 10, 2004 (UTC)

Semi-recent events have rendered this statement inaccurate: "Many of the subsequent message digest designs based on it remain secure, in the sense that no effective attack has been published against them." Perhaps it's time to edit this? I'd do it now, but sleep deprivation is getting to me -_- --PacoBell 15:43, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I replaced it, but I'm sure it could be worded better. — Matt Crypto 18:36, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The fourth in a series

Is it really the fourth? I've heard of MD2, MD4 and MD5 but never of MD1 and MD3.

• Yep. MD (not "MD1") is proprietary, and was never published. MD3 was superseded by MD4 before its publication (not sure why the "3" wasn't reused, so to speak). We should add this, but I'm not sure where, as it is obviously also relevant to the MD2 and MD5 articles. What do we do in such cases? Use transclusion? —Gennaro Prota^•Talk 23:13, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

I think we just cut and paste. Transclusion is normally used only for things like side-boxes and the like, whereas main text is in-line. — Matt Crypto 16:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I have a source for MD3, namely Schneier's Applied Cryptography 2nd ed p. 446, "MD3 is yet another hash function designed by Ron Rivest. It had several flaws and never really made it out of the laboratory, although a description was recently published in [1335]." (So real cryptographers work in laboratories, it seems!) — Matt Crypto 17:43, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer :-) I'm really curious, could you please explicit the [1335]? As to transclusion, I'm sure you know the evils of duplicating information (in Wikipedia, or any other information system). If the current practice is copy-and-paste then we have a bad current practice. —Gennaro Prota^•Talk 15:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

1335 comes out as "MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA and other hash functions. M.J.B. Robshaw. RSA Laboratories Technical Report TR-101. V 3.0 July 1994." The problem with transclusion of text fragments is that introduces complexity, and we want to keep editing as simple as possible. An alternative is to consolidate the information into an overview article of some kind -- we could have, hypothetically, a "MD hash function series" article. Probably Ronald Rivest would suffice, though. — Matt Crypto 16:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)