Is “double hashing” a password less secure than just hashing it once?

Question

Is hashing a password twice before storage any more or less secure than just hashing it once?

What I\'m talking about is doing this:

$hashed_password         


        

Answer 1

Yes - it reduces the number of possibly strings that match the string.

As you have already mentioned, salted hashes are much better.

An article here: http://websecurity.ro/blog/2007/11/02/md5md5-vs-md5/, attempts a proof at why it is equivalent, but I'm not sure with the logic. Partly they assume that there isn't software available to analyse md5(md5(text)), but obviously it's fairly trivial to produce the rainbow tables.

I'm still sticking with my answer that there are smaller number of md5(md5(text)) type hashes than md5(text) hashes, increasing the chance of collision (even if still to an unlikely probability) and reducing the search space.