MD4 Hash Generator

About

MD4 is a hash function that produces a 128-bit message digest. It was developed by Ronald Rivest in 1990 and has influenced later designs, such as MD5, SHA-1, and RIPEMD.

The MD4 hash function generator is a valuable tool that is required to generate a unique string that can be used as a password or key. This key can be used to protect NT LAN Manager passwords in Windows NT, XP, and Vista.

MD4 is no longer considered secure due to the number of attacks that have been published against it. As of 2007, an attacker can generate collisions in less than 2 MD4 hash operations. A theoretical preimage attack also exists.

MD4 is used in the ed2k URI scheme to provide a unique identifier for a file in the popular eDonkey2000 / eMule P2P networks. A variant of MD4 is also used by the rsync protocol (prior to version 3.0.0).

MD4 is used to compute NTLM password-derived key digests on Microsoft Windows NT, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10. This allows for passwords to be more secure and less susceptible to being hacked.

The MD4 hash function is weak and can be easily attacked. This was demonstrated in 1991 by Den Boer and Bosselaers in a paper they published. The first full-round MD4 collision attack was found by Hans Dobbertin in 1995. At that time, it only took seconds to carry out the attack. In August 2004, Wang et al. found a very efficient collision attack, alongside attacks on later hash function designs in the MD4/MD5/SHA-1/RIPEMD family. This result was improved later by Sasaki et al., and generating a collision is now as cheap as verifying it (a few microseconds).

In 2008, Gaëtan Leurent broke the preimage resistance of MD4 with a 2102 attack. In 2010, Guo et al published a 299.7 attack.

RFC 6150 stated in 2011 that RFC 1320 (MD4) is now obsolete.