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> Passing the password through MD5 reduces the complexity to 128 bits

No, this is not the problem with MD5. You are not going to find two user-memorizeable-and-typeable passwords with an MD5 collision.

If you are bringing a password with more than 128 bits of complexity to the party, any password storage scheme better than plaintext will have your password safe.




For passwords, there is no known problem with MD5, unless you know about a preimage attack.

Collisions are a problem for digital signatures, not for passwords.

But some people do want and use more than 2^128 bit passwords, for whatever reason, and an MD5 intermediate stage limits that.




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