Cryptanalysis of MD2

Abstract

This paper considers the hash function MD2 which was developed by Ron Rivest in 1989. Despite its age, MD2 has withstood cryptanalytic attacks until recently. This paper contains the state-of-the-art cryptanalytic results on MD2, in particular collision and preimage attacks on the full hash function, the latter having complexity 2 73, which should be compared to a brute-force attack of complexity 2 128. © 2009 International Association for Cryptologic Research.