RIPEMD (RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest) is a family of cryptographic hash functions was based upon the design principles used in MD4, and is similar in performance to the more popular SHA-1 first published in 1996. RIPEMD is developed in Leuven, Belgium, by Hans Dobbertin, Antoon Bosselaers and Bart Preneel at the COSIC research group. RIPEMD-160 is the most common version in the family, It is a 160-bit version of the original RIPEMD. RIPEMD-160 was designed in the open academic community, in contrast to the NSA designed SHA-1 and SHA-2 algorithms.