Finding MD5 Collisions on a Notebook PC Using Multi-message Modifications

In this paper, we summarize the results achieved during our brief three months long research on collisions of the MD5 hash function. Being inspired by the results announced by Wang et al. [1] we independently developed methods for finding collisions which work for any initialization value and which are quicker than the methods presented in [1, 8]. It enables us to find a MD5 collision on a standard notebook PC roughly in 8 hours [7]. Independently on [1, 8], we discovered and propose several multi-message modification methods, which are more effective than methods described in [1, 8]. We show their principle.