About MD5

MD5 (Message Digest 5) produces a 128-bit (32 hex character) hash value. It was designed by Ron Rivest in 1991 as a cryptographic hash function, but is now considered cryptographically broken due to collision vulnerabilities discovered in the 1990s and 2000s.

When MD5 is still appropriate

• File integrity checksums — verifying accidental corruption (not malicious tampering)
• Cache keys / lookup identifiers — hashing a large string to a short, uniform key
• Non-security deduplication — detecting duplicate files or records in a database
• Legacy systems — where the hash format is mandated and cannot be changed

When NOT to use MD5

• Password storage — use bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 instead
• Digital signatures — use SHA-256 or SHA-3
• Security-sensitive checksums — use SHA-256 or BLAKE2

Hash algorithm comparison