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Indy MD5 - Inconsistent results

I have Delphi 6, and am using the TIdCoderMD5 component to create an MD5 hash, implemented to derive an intended identical hash from a string of typically 50-150 chars. In fact, I have three strings of 10-50 chars and use one as the seed and concatenate the other two together to create the message to be hashed.

This works fine MOST of the time, (say 99%+), but occasionally (and only occasionally) I'm finding the same component generates different hashes in the two programs. I have checked the inputs to ensure they are identical - and they are ...

Is this version a bit flakey ?

I see other versions mentioned in this forum. Are there other implementations of MD5 that others have used and proved as reliable. ?

Input appreciated.
Geoff

Lee_Nover

what indy version ? get the lates and check with that
if the problem still persists .. change to something else
like DEC: http://www.delphi32.com/vcl/3267/

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BlackTigerX

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geoffdb

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Lee & Black Tiger

Thanks for your responses.

I don't know what the version is, the Indy help file doesn't say, and I couldn't directly find anything in the source files either. Its the one that came with Delphi 6.

Anyway, I've done some of my own testing, set up a routine that i can create 10k, 50k or 100k hashes, write these to disk (incld.the source data and hash), then read this data back in a second process, recalc the hash & compare with the original hash. Even at 10,000 hashes I always got an error with the Indy version. Not only that, it chewed up memory.

Using the same code, I replaced the Indy MD5 routine with a) the fichter one above, and b) the TurboPower Lockbox version - and found they both ran sweet, no different hashes, and no memory probs. !!!

Interesting !! I'm already using TP Lockbox so think I'll run with this.

Thanks
Geoff

BlackTigerX

great! =o)

thanks for sharing your tests