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Old 04-11-2006, 12:41 PM   #8 (permalink)
JGuru
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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Default Re: Installation stops at 4th CD for SuSE 10.1

@Mehul, md5sum is not without flaws. And shasum is defintely better than md5sum.
But it runs slowly at 1/6 th speed of md5sum!!

Quote:
MD5 is flawed

Given known current flaws in MD5, it is possible to produce bogus data that matches a given MD5, though no constraints can be placed upon the content. A trojan, for instance, cannot be placed in a MD5'd file, but the file can contain random data.

However, one of the fairly obvious ways to use MD5 is with a "tree" of checksums -- one for the whole file, one for each half, one for each quarter, etc, etc, etc. In this case, it is not possible to produce data that will pass validation.

eDonkey uses MD4 hashes -- which is significantly easier to attack than MD5 -- yet I haven't seen problems with forged chunks on eDonkey.

And while SHA-1 is nice -- and it might be just easier if everyone used it -- it is significantly slower. When I tested the md5sum and shasum implementations on my Linux box, I found that shasum ran at about a sixth the speed of md5sum.
I quoted it from this link

You need to scroll down a bit to read this one!!
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