MD5 stands for Message Digest 5. It is a one-way cryptographic hash function used to produce and calculate checksums of software to verify its integrity
- It performs a bunch of binary operations on the software to compute a 128-bit hash
Linux has a CLI tool called md5sum that can be used to obtain the MD5 checksum of a downloaded software application, which can be hand-verified by the MD5 checksum provided by the original upstream developer
- Why 128-bit hash?