Analysis of MD5 Algorithm Safety against Hardware Implementation of Brute Force Attack

Abstract: MD5 is one of the most widely used hash functions generating 128 bits cipher. Theoretically, this algorithm requires 2128 iteration for brute force attack. This complexity represents a challenge on cracking this algorithm due to the computational time. The hardware implementation of algorithm cracking increases the speed dramatically. In addition to that, using MD5 for the encryption of weak and short passwords reduces the iterations and allow breaking the password in few seconds or minutes. In this paper, the MD5 algorithm resistivity and safety has been analysed based on FPGA implementations. Different parallel architectures for implementing the algorithm have been investigated. Different sets of strong and weak passwords have been used to test these architectures. The time for cracking the cipher has been measured indicating the performance of the MD5 algorithm.

Keywords: MD5, encryption, FPGA, password cracking