The cryptographic strength of the HMAC depends upon the size of the secret key that is used. The most common attack against HMACs is brute force to uncover the secret key. HMACs are substantially less affected by collisions than their underlying hashing algorithms alone. In particular, in 2006 Mihir Bellare proved that HMAC is a PRF under the sole assumption that the compression function is a PRF. Therefore, HMAC-MD5 does not suffer from the same weaknesses that have been found in MD5.