You are the Security Consultant and have been contacted by a client regarding their encryption and hashing algorithms. Their in-house network administrator tells you that their current hashing…

Question

Options

• APKI
• BSHA
• CKerberos
• DMD5

• B
  8% (2)
• C
  4% (1)
• D
  88% (23)

Explanation

MD5 (Message Digest 5) is the answer because it is a well-known hashing algorithm that has documented collision vulnerabilities - researchers have demonstrated that two different inputs can produce the same hash output, making it cryptographically broken for security-sensitive use cases.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is an entire framework for managing digital certificates and asymmetric encryption - not a hashing algorithm at all.
• B. SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is also a hashing algorithm, but modern variants (SHA-256, SHA-3) are considered strong and collision-resistant; SHA-1 has weaknesses but MD5 is the more notorious "older algorithm with known weaknesses."
• C. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol, not a hashing algorithm.

Memory tip: Think "MD5 = Must Discard (it's) 5ever broken" - MD5 is the go-to exam answer when the question mentions an old, weak, collision-prone hash. If a question says "outdated hashing" or "not collision resistant," MD5 is almost always the target answer over SHA.

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