So I’m teaching my course in Securing Java Web Applications (my third one in the last six weeks) and we got to a section that discussed the MD5 algorithm for generating message digests.
One of the students asked, “whatever happened to MD’s 1 through 4?”
I simply couldn’t resist saying, “MD’s 1, 2, and 3 were sabotaged during construction. MD4 vanished without a trace shortly after it came online. Now we have MD5, our last, best hope for peaceful digests.”
To my pleasant surprise, about five different students got the joke.
(And yes, every time I see the abbreviation JMS I don’t think Java Message Service, I think J. Michael Straczynski.)
We live for the One; we die for the One.
