Quantum Implementation of MD5

Sangmin Cha; GyeongJu Song; Seyoung Yoon; Hwajeong Seo

Paper 2025/1572

Quantum Implementation of MD5

Sangmin Cha

, Hansung University

GyeongJu Song

, Hansung University

Seyoung Yoon

, Hansung University

Hwajeong Seo

, Hansung University

Abstract

Quantum attacks such as Grover’s algorithm reduce the security of classical hash functions such as MD5. In this paper, we present an efficient quantum circuit for the MD5 hash function and apply Grover’s algorithm to perform an effective pre-image attack. Our MD5 quantum circuit first focuses on reducing quantum circuit depth, while also considering the number of qubits. To this end, we applied Draper’s carrylookahead adder to the MD5 quantum circuit and modified its structure. When Draper’s adder was applied to the proposed MD5 structure, there was an approximately 81.4% reduction compared to before application. As a result, the proposed MD5 quantum circuit uses only 858 qubits and has a depth of 7,598.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Quantum Computer Grover's Algorithm Quantum Collision Search MD5 Hash Function Post Quantum Security
Contact author(s): xhxhdwkdpsyentific @ gmail com
thdrudwn98 @ gmail com
sebbang99 @ gmail com
hwajeong84 @ gmail com
History: 2025-09-03: approved; 2025-09-02: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/1572
License: CC0

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1572,
      author = {Sangmin Cha and GyeongJu Song and Seyoung Yoon and Hwajeong Seo},
      title = {Quantum Implementation of {MD5}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1572},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1572}
}