Uniform distribution of truncated md5?

Question

Can we say that a truncated md5 hash is still uniformly distributed?

To avoid misinterpretations: I\'m aware the chance of collisions is much greater th

Answer 1

I wrote a little php-program to answer this question. It's not very scientific, but it shows the distribution for the first and the last 8 bits of the hashvalues using the natural numbers as hashtext. After about 40.000.000 hashes the difference between the highest and the lowest counts goes down to 1%, so I'd say the distribution is ok. I hope the code is more precise in explaining what was computed :-) Btw, with a similar program I found that the last 8 bits seem to be distributed slightly better than the first.

 $max) $max = $n;
      print $n."\t";
    }
    print "\n";
  }
  print "Hashes: $hashCount, Min: $min, Max: $max, Delta: ".((($max-$min)*100)/$max)."%\n";
} 
?>