MD2 Hash Generator
Turn any text into its 32-character MD2 hash instantly.
How to use the MD2 Hash Generator
- Type or paste your text in the box.
- The MD2 hash appears as you type.
- Click Copy to grab the result.
About the MD2 Hash Generator
MD2 (Message Digest 2) was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1989 and outputs a 128-bit digest as 32 hexadecimal characters — the same width as MD5, and nothing else in common. MD2 was built for the machines of its day: it was optimised for 8-bit computers, and its internals reflect that, working through a byte-substitution table rather than the 32-bit word operations that later hashes rely on. On modern 64-bit hardware that design choice makes MD2 remarkably slow — it is comfortably the slowest hash you will find in a mainstream crypto library, and the slowness buys no security whatsoever.
MD2 is thoroughly broken and obsolete. Treat it as a historical artifact, not an option. It should never be used for passwords, signatures or integrity checks — anything you are choosing a hash for today should use SHA-256 or SHA3-256 instead.
Where you still bump into MD2 is old public-key infrastructure: it was specified in RFC 1319 and used to sign early X.509 certificates under the md2WithRSAEncryption identifier, some of which sat in root certificate stores long after the algorithm was discredited. Modern software rejects those signatures outright. If you are hashing MD2 here, it is almost certainly to reproduce a value from a legacy system, decode an old certificate, or satisfy curiosity about how hashing looked before the MD4 family took over — all of which are perfectly good reasons.
Frequently asked questions
Can I decrypt or reverse an MD2 hash?
No. Hashing is one-way — the original text is not stored inside the hash, so there is nothing to decrypt. Any “MD2 decrypter” is simply a table of previously hashed common strings.
Why is MD2 so slow?
It was optimised for 8-bit computers in 1989 and works byte by byte through a substitution table, so it cannot take advantage of the wide word operations modern CPUs are built around. Later hashes like MD5 and SHA-256 were designed for 32-bit and 64-bit machines.
Why is my MD2 hash always 32 characters?
MD2 always outputs 128 bits, and each hex character represents 4 bits, so every MD2 hash is exactly 32 characters regardless of input length.
Is MD2 related to MD5?
Only by name and output size. MD5 descends from MD4, which is a completely different design; MD2 is an earlier, unrelated construction and produces a totally different hash for the same input.
Is my text sent anywhere?
Your text is sent to our server to be hashed, because browsers cannot compute MD2. It is hashed and immediately discarded — never logged, never stored.