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It's not advisable to use MD5 for anything. It's security is severely compromised. Weaknesses in MD5 have already been exploited to create a fake root CA[1] and a fake Microsoft code-signing certificate[2]. There isn't practical publicly-known preimage attack, but there was a theoretical attack published in 2009[3]. Additionally, MD5 can be calculated far too quickly to use for password hashing. A commodity GPU from 2009 can calculate 200 million MD5 hashes per second [4]. For password hashing you should use something like bcrypt or scrypt which is specifically designed to be computationally expensive.

[1] http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

[2] http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2012/06/06/more-infor...

[3] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-01001-9...

[4] http://bvernoux.free.fr/md5/index.php



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