Is MD5 or SHA more secure?
Although slower, SHA is more secure than MD5 due to a variety of reasons. First, it produces a larger digest, 160-bit compared to 128-bit, so a brute force attack would be much more difficult to carry out. They can be considered among the most secure, although they are not very fast.
Is SHA1 secure?
For more than six years, the SHA1 cryptographic hash function underpinning Internet security has been at death’s door. Now it’s officially dead, thanks to the submission of the first known instance of a fatal exploit known as a “collision.” The GnuPG e-mail encryption program still deems SHA1 safe.
What do you need to know about salted MD5?
What people call “salted MD5” or “salted SHA-1” are in fact new cryptographic construction, assembling some encoding convention (to transform the password into a sequence of bits) and a salt value (another sequence of characters or bits) into one (or a few) invocations of the hash function.
Which is more secure MD5 or SHA-256?
The SHA-256 algorithm returns hash value of 256-bits, or 64 hexadecimal digits. While not quite perfect, current research indicates it is considerably more secure than either MD5 or SHA-1. Performance-wise, a SHA-256 hash is about 20-30% slower to calculate than either MD5 or SHA-1 hashes.
What do MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions do?
MD5 and SHA-1 are well-defined hash functions, which take as input a sequence of bits of (almost) arbitrary length, and output a sequence of bits of fixed length (128 and 160 bits, respectively). There is no salt anywhere in the definitions of MD5 and SHA-1; no password either, for that matter.
What can I do to make MD5 more secure?
Make sure to choose a long salt to improve security enough. 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. But be careful, people will often use weak passwords, even if you implement all of this.