Message Digest 5
Message Digest 5 (MD5) is a popular cryptography algorithm. Message Digest works by breaking up the message into chunks of 512-bit blocks. Generally in any cryptography algorithm you need to store the key somewhere so that when a genuine party needs to decrypt it needs to get the key to decrypt it. There is no concept of key in MD5, the message is basically digested by an algorithm that converts it into a hash value. So the only way you can know the content is that if you know the original content use the same algorithm to encrypt it again using MD5 and compare the digest value with the originally digested value. MD5 algorithm can be used in applications where you want to store the password in a database. First time when the user registers with your application you can apply the md5 algorithm to digest the password and store it in the table. When the user tries to login, you accept the user name and password and again apply md5 to the password and then compare the result with the value stored in the table.
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