11.1.5 RIPEMD-160: Package Crypt::RIPEMD160

Submitted by admin on Thu, 2007-11-15 09:34

11.1.5  RIPEMD-160: Package Crypt::RIPEMD160

   

The RIPEMD-160 message digest algorithm was developed by a group of European researchers. RIPEMD takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output an 160-bit message digest. The input is processed in 512-bit blocks. The overall processing is similar to that of MD5.

All three algorithms, MD5, SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160, are similar because they are all inspired by the design of MD4. MD5 has been shown to be vulnerable to cryptanalytic attacks, but SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160 are not known to be vulnerable at this time. RIPEMD-160 is also a little slower than MD5, just as SHA-1 is. The Perl module Crypt::RIPEMD160 is very similar to Digest::MD5 and hence, used the same way.