MD5

The MD5 Message Digest Algorithm (RFC1321) provides a 128-bit 'signature' or 'fingerprint' for a file or string. It was created by Ron Rivest.

In order to guard against file corruption or tampering, I compute the MD5 fingerprint of files available for download. After you download the file, you can compute this value and compare it to what's listed on my Web page. If the values are different, then the file is corrupt and should not be used.

I compute the MD5 fingerprint using a public domain command-line MD5 implementation for MS-DOS/Windows which is available from John Walker (author of the venerable @FANG and co-author of AutoCAD).


Revised 2004-02-10