RIPEMD
RIPEMD (RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest) is a family of cryptographic hash functions developed in , by , and at the research group at the , and first published in 1996. RIPEMD was based upon the design principles used in MD4, and is similar in performance to the more popular SHA-1.
RIPEMD-160 is an improved, 160-bit version of the original RIPEMD, and the most common version in the family. RIPEMD-160 was designed in the open academic community, in contrast to the -designed SHA-1 and SHA-2 algorithms. On the other hand, RIPEMD-160 appears to be used somewhat less frequently than SHA-1, which may have caused it to be less scrutinized than SHA-1. RIPEMD-160 is not known to be constrained by any patents.
As well as 160-bit, there also exist 128-, 256- and 320-bit versions of this algorithm, called RIPEMD-128, RIPEMD-256, and RIPEMD-320, respectively. The 128-bit version was intended only as a drop-in replacement for the original RIPEMD, which was also 128-bit, and which had been found to have questionable security. The 256- and 320-bit versions diminish only the chance of accidental and don’t have higher levels of security (against ) as compared to, respectively, RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160.
In August 2004, a collision was reported for the original RIPEMD. This does not apply to RIPEMD-160.
RIPEMD-160 hashes
The 160-bit RIPEMD-160 hashes (also termed RIPE message digests) are typically represented as 40-digit numbers. The following demonstrates a 43-byte input and the corresponding RIPEMD-160 hash:
RIPEMD-160("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy og") = 37f332f68db77bd9d7edd4969571ad671cf9dd3b RIPEMD-160 behaves with the desired of cryptographic hash functions (small changes, e.g. changing d to c, result in a completely different hash):
RIPEMD-160("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy og") = 132072df690933835eb8b6ad0b77e7b6f14acad7 The hash of a zero-length string is:
RIPEMD-160("") = 9c1185a5c5e9fc54612808977ee8f548b2258d31