Sometime on Mar 31, Vinay Pai assembled some asciibets to say:

The MD5 hash is 128 bits long. This means that there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 values. This means that even if you could try a TRILLION combinations a second it would take you 10,790,283,070,806,014,188 years to break!

A brute force attack against MD5 won't work.

try a distributed attack. use the processing power of every computer on the planet.

actually, thinking of it this way, wouldn't it just make sense to create a reverse lookup table of every possible password and its encrypted value.

On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Nikhil Joshi wrote:

...

The MD5 hash is 128 bits long. This means that there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 values. This means

Just curious. How did you calculate this?

according to xcalc 2^128 = 3.402823e+38

try python:

2L**128

or perl:

perl -e 'print sprintf("%39.0f", 2**128)'

Or you could use this to commify and print it:

my $n = reverse sprintf("%39.0f", 2**128); $n =~ s/\G(\d{3})(?=\d)/$1,/g; $n = reverse $n; print $n;

ask me why and ask me what.