has any cycle found in MD5?

618 Views Asked by At

We are not sure whether MD5 has fixed point or not. But since the sample space is finite, it must have cycles:

$$ A →(MD5)→ B →(MD5)→ C →(MD5)→ D →(MD5)→ A $$

Has any research been done on MD5 to find cycles?

What caused I think about it is that if S is the sample space and R1 the range of MD5(once or taken in any number) them R1⊆S also R2⊆R1

MD5(one or multiple): S → R1

MD5(one or multiple): R1 → R2

...

1

There are 1 best solutions below

1
On

Not yet*.

The only major project to try to find a cycle shut down in 2004 once a general collision vulnerability was found, due to the fact that a latter is a much more severe vulnerability.

I was unable to find anything other than that Wikipedia article and this very thread on the topic. (There is a group that looked into ways to improve the internal state's cycle length, to help engineer future editions or hash functions to be more robust; however, this is unrelated to cycles of the digest itself when feeding the digest back into the function wholesale.)

*Do you want to find one?

To get a cycle for MD5 would require nowhere near as much power as breaking it.

Wikipedian Taxman estimated in 2004 that it would take a 12.25-Teraflops supercomputing cluster about 1.77Ms (i.e. just under 3 weeks) to find a cycle. These days, an arbitrary provider, Nimbix, could allegedly provide this [if my math is correct] on the order of 1 business day and $800.