A Modified MD5 Algorithm Incorporating Hirose Compression Function

Abstract

Hashing is the widely used method in cryptographic protocols and the data integrity check. Among the most utilized cryptographic hashing functions is the MD5 for a variety of applications. However, the strength of MD5 against brute force attack is produced by the algorithm that deals with security flaws and vulnerabilities. This study presents the modification of the round functions of the MD5 with a novelty on incorporating the Hirose function. Simulation of the proposed algorithm was conducted using PHP. Experiment results showed that the modified MD5 algorithm produced more secure hashed output. Through several tests like avalanche test and differential attack test, the simulation result showed the superiority of the modified algorithm over the typical algorithm. For the proof of the concept, the study used the flipped 17th bit. The experimentation result of the avalanche effect of the typical MD5 versus modified MD5, the former has 58.38 hamming distance and has 42.71% avalanche effect while the latter has 67.38 hamming distance and 52.86% avalanche effect. Thus, the test results for the Modified MD5 has a greater percentage than the Typical Modified with an evident increase of 10.15%.