On May 19, 2006, at 1:03 PM, Maarten de Vries wrote:
I'm no expert, but isn't a hash supposed to be irreversible? But, like I said, I'm not busy encrypting things to reverse them, just to check data. So MD5(source+key) should do it. If the key would always we the same, than I wouldn't even need to add a key, since MD5 is irreversible (right?).
Well it depends on what you are hashing. If you are hashing passwords ranging from 1 to 10 characters, then a blunt force technique could be used to "reverse" the hash. "Decrypting" an application archive would be impossible.
I believe that Charles was talking about using Md5 hashes to encrypt/ decrypt data. This is where you XOR binary chunks of data (source) with an equal sized Md5 hash (repeated and/or rehashed as necessary to match sizes). You are not actually reversing the Md5 hash, but rather using cpu to locate patterns in the encrypted string. If you know the name "Fred" occurs at least once in the decrypted source, then you can probably reverse engineer the encryption key.
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