Question

I was wondering if I could reasons or links to resources explaining why SHA512 is a superior hashing algorithm to MD5.

Answer 1

It depends on your use case. You can’t broadly claim “superiority”. (I mean, yes you can, in some cases, but to be strict about it, you can’t really).

But there are areas where MD5 has been broken:

1. For starters: MD5 is old, and common. There are tons of rainbow tables against it, and they’re easy to find. So if you’re hashing passwords (without a salt – shame on you!) – using md5 – you might as well not be hashing them, they’re so easy to find. Even if you’re hashing with simple salts really.
2. Second off, MD5 is no longer secure as a cryptographic hash function (indeed it is not even considered a cryptographic hash function anymore as the Forked One points out). You can generate different messages that hash to the same value. So if you’ve got a SSL Certificate with a MD5 hash on it, I can generate a duplicate Certificate that says what I want, that produces the same hash. This is generally what people mean when they say MD5 is ‘broken’ – things like this.
3. Thirdly, similar to messages, you can also generate different files that hash to the same value so using MD5 as a file checksum is ‘broken’.

Now, SHA-512 is a SHA-2 Family hash algorithm. SHA-1 is kind of considered ‘eh’ these days, I’ll ignore it. SHA-2 however, has relatively few attacks against it. The major one wikipedia talks about is a reduced-round preimage attack which means if you use SHA-512 in a horribly wrong way, I can break it. Obivously you’re not likely to be using it that way, but attacks only get better, and it’s a good springboard into more research to break SHA-512 in the same way MD5 is broken.

However, out of all the Hash functions available, the SHA-2 family is currently amoung the strongest, and the best choice considering commonness, analysis, and security. (But not necessarily speed. If you’re in embedded systems, you need to perform a whole other analysis.)