RIPEMD-160 (160 bit) is (RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest). RIPEMD-128 is part of message digest family (cryptographic hash functions) developed in Leuven, Belgium, by Hans Dobbertin, Antoon Bosselaers and Bart Preneel at the COSIC research group at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and first published in 1996. RIPEMD was based upon the design principles used in MD4, and is similar in performance to the more popular SHA-1.

The 160-bit RIPEMD-160 hashes (also termed RIPE message digests) are typically represented as 40-digit hexadecimal numbers.