11.1.3 The MD4 Digest: Package Digest::MD4

11.1.3  The MD4 Digest: Package Digest::MD4

MD4 is a precursor to MD5 designed by the same designer, Rivest. It was originally published in 1990. MD5 shares the design goals of MD4. It addition, several other algorithms are based on the design goals of MD4.

One of the design goals of a hash code is that it should be computationally infeasible to find two messages that have the same message digest. At the time of its publication, MD4 was secure against brute-force attacks. It was also secure against more sophisticated cryptanalytic attacks according to Rivest. MD4 is simple because simple algorithms are easier to implement without errors and can be scrutinized by the research community more thoroughly. MD4 is a little faster to compute than MD5. The Perl module for MD4 is similar to the Perl module for MD5, and hence, used similarly. The module is called Crypt::MD4.