[PT] 16-Feb-2004

RIPEMD is a cryptographic hash based upon MD4.
It's been shown to have weaknesses and has been replaced by RIPEMD-128 and RIPMD-160.
These are cryptographic hash functions designed by Hans Dobbertin, Antoon Bosselaers,
and Bart Preneel. [http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~bosselae/ripemd160.html]

The name comes from the project they were designed for: EU project RIPE (RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation, 1988-1992).

RIPEMD-160 produces a hash of the same length as [SHA1] but is slightly slower. RIPEMD-128 has been designed as
a drop-in replacement for MD4/MD5 whilst avoiding some of the weaknesses shown for these two algorithms.
(These are possible hash collisions.)
It is about half the speed of MD5.

Implementations for both these hashing functions are present in [Trf],
and a [tcllib] module provides a pure-Tcl version if required.
The [tcllib] version will use Trf if it is available.
See http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/doc/ripemd.html for details.

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See also [md4], [md5], [sha1], [sha2]
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[[ [Category Cryptography] | [Category Package], subset [tcllib] ]]