Reversing an MD5 Hash

akano1 picture akano1 · Sep 24, 2009 · Viewed 17.2k times · Source

Someone told me that he has seen software systems that:

  1. retrieve MD5 encrypted passwords from other systems;
  2. decrypt the encrypted passwords and
  3. store the passwords in the database of the system using the systems own algorithm.

Is that possible? I thought that it wasn't possible / feasible to decrypt MD5 hashes.

I know there are MD5 dictionaries, but is there an actual decryption algorithm?

Answer