MD5, SHA-1 and more

It is time to break out the math textbooks - MD5 (also know as the hash algorithm) may be flawed. What does this mean? Well a hash of a document has been used for a long time to assure that the document has not be tampered with, apache and sun both use this system to assure that users have a genuine download of their software. All of that could be out the window. It has been generally assumed that if you could not create the same hash for a different document in your lifetime then it is fairly secure but now it appears that you could make the same MD5 hash (called a hash collision) in a few hours on the average PC - not good. Read more here