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Yes, MD5 can produce hash collisions in a very small percentage of cases. For many uses this shouldn’t be significant, but for security there are better options.

I prefer the SHA-2 series, referred to as SHA-224/256/384/512, because the algorithms are strong and widely supported.

If you need the hashes to be un-guessable then I’d recommend hashing more than just the input data. A well accepted strategy is to include a secret key in the computation, resulting in a keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), and another useful technique is to concatenate a “salt”, which may or may not be secret, with the input.

PHP versions >= 5.1.2 have the hash_hmac() and hash() functions:

$hmac = hash_hmac('sha256', $data, $key); // hex string output

$hmac = base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha256', $data, $key, TRUE)); // force binary output before encoding

$hash = hash('sha256', $data . $salt);

PHP versions < 5.3 have the mhash() function:

$hmac = base64_encode(mhash(MHASH_SHA256, $data, $key)); // mhash produces binary output

$hash = bin2hex(mhash(MHASH_SHA256, $data . $salt));

There’s a nice table of algorithms and their properties on Wikipedia.

Original email discussion was on the DC PHP Developers Group list.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Q & A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.