MD5

From Unofficial BOINC Wiki

[edit] General

This is a mechanism that is used to validate that a data transfer has take place correctly. In the past simplistic methods were used which included simple "checksum" calculations and other mechanism that were either very error prone, or could not detect many classes of multiple bit failures. Because of this problem there were two choices, do a byte for byte compare after completion of the transfer; or, place your head firmly into the sand and hope. To address this problem the MD5 algorithm was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest of MIT. What this algorithm does, to quote the executive summary of rfc1321, is:

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than using a simple checksum or any of the other common methods of data transfer error detection.

[edit] Also See

• Wikipedia: MD5
• Digital Signature
• Code Verification Key