note 90494 deleted from function.md5 by tularis

Note Submitter: Anonymous ---- 8 character passwords from a set of 76 characters have 1,127,875,251,287,710 possibilities Passwords are rarely random, hence we have heuristics. It is very easy to generate 500,000,000 MD5/s on a desktop machine with a decent GPU A quad core with a four cheap 8800GT's could probably do nearly 2 Billion per second At this rate it would take less than 7 days to break all possible hashes made from passwords using this charset and of length <= 8 It is also important to observe moore's law. Software isn't written to last a day and migration from one system to another is a pain in the ass. In 10 years time MD5 will be an awful algorithm to use to hash passwords. We will probably have enough computing power on a desktop machine to find a collision for most hashes within 5-10 years (2^64) Put into perspective changes in technology and distributed efforts and MD5 becomes weak. Why use MD5 when you can use SHA-1 and save yourself a lot of hassle?