Posted: April 22nd, 2022

Hashing

Hashing
Message integrity means that the contents of a message have not been altered or tampered with. As such, it is a characteristic where data has not been changed in an unauthorized way since its creation, transmission, or storage by an authorized source. When hash collisions are generated it is made to appear that somebody digitally signed a document that in the actual sense, they did not sign. This is bad, very bad to message integrity. This is because a collision means that there is more than one way to generate the same sum (Kumar, 2020). Unauthorized persons or hackers could take advantage of this and hence gain access to the message. They could then tamper with it.
Message Digest 5 (MD5) is basically a cryptographic hash algorithm that can be utilized in the creation of a 128-bit string value from a random length string. However, the MD5 algorithm is reported to have high chances of collisions. The collision weakness as it relates to this algorithm permits attackers to develop many differing input sources that, when the MD5 algorithm is utilized, the result is a similar output fingerprint (Luttgens, Pepe & Mandia, 2014). It has been shown that attackers can develop many input sources to MD5 that result in a similar output fingerprint. Allegedly, at this period, attackers are not able to produce random collisions. Also, it is reported that only a very restricted number individual bits in an input message may be changed when maintaining a matching output fingerprint. It is worth noting that the high collision weakness may enable attackers to develop 2 messages, or binaries that are executable such that their MD5 fingerprints are alike. One of these binaries or messages would be innocent, and the other malicious. The former may be signed digitally, and then later would have the malicious file replaced into its place. This attack may make it possible for malicious code to be executed.

References
Kumar, A. (2020). Hyperledger fabric in-depth: Learn, build and deploy blockchain applications using Hyperledger fabric. BPB Publications.
Luttgens, J., Pepe, M., & Mandia, K. (2014). Incident response & computer forensics (3rd ed.). McGraw Hill Professional.

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