How many random elements before MD5 produces collisions?

Question

I\'ve got an image library on Amazon S3. For each image, I md5 the source URL on my server plus a timestamp to get a unique filename. Since S3 can\'t have subdirectories, I

Answer 1

Although random MD5 collisions are exceedingly rare, if your users can provide files (that will be stored verbatim) then they can engineer collisions to occur. That is, they can deliberately create two files with the same MD5sum but different data. Make sure your application can handle this case in a sensible way, or perhaps use a stronger hash like SHA-256.