An effective information security policy should be designed with a long-term focus.
All other characteristics apply.
Source: ALLEN, Julia H., The CERT Guide to System and Network Security Practices, Addison-
Wesley, 2001, Appendix B, Practice-Level Policy Considerations (page 397).

SSL provides for Peer Authentication. Though peer authentication is possible, authentication of the client is seldom used in practice when connecting to public e-commerce web sites. Once authentication is complete, confidentiality is assured over the session by the use of symmetric encryption in the interests of better performance.
The following answers were all incorrect: "Peer identification" is incorrect. The desired attribute is assurance of the identity of the communicating parties provided by authentication and NOT identification. Identification is only who you claim to be. Authentication is proving who you claim to be. "Server authentication" is incorrect. While server authentication only is common practice, the protocol provides for peer authentication (i.e., authentication of both client and server). This answer was not complete. "Name resolution" is incorrect. Name resolution is commonly provided by the Domain Name System (DNS) not SSL.
Reference(s) used for this question: CBK, pp. 496 - 497.

A hash algorithm (alternatively, hash "function") takes binary data, called the message, and produces a condensed representation, called the message digest. A cryptographic hash algorithm is a hash algorithm that is designed to achieve certain security properties. The Federal Information Processing Standard 180-3, Secure Hash Standard, specifies five cryptographic hash algorithms - SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 for federal use in the US; the standard was also widely adopted by the information technology industry and commercial companies.
The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value. Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity. MD5 was designed by Ron Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function, MD4. An MD5 hash is typically expressed as a 32-digit hexadecimal number.
However, it has since been shown that MD5 is not collision resistant; as such, MD5 is not suitable for applications like SSL certificates or digital signatures that rely on this property. In 1996, a flaw was found with the design of MD5, and while it was not a clearly fatal weakness, cryptographers began recommending the use of other algorithms, such as SHA-1 - which has since been found also to be vulnerable. In 2004, more serious flaws were discovered in MD5, making further use of the algorithm for security purposes questionable - specifically, a group of researchers described how to create a pair of files that share the same MD5 checksum. Further advances were made in breaking MD5 in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In December 2008, a group of researchers used this technique to fake SSL certificate validity, and US-CERT now says that MD5 "should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use." and most U.S. government applications now require the SHA-2 family of hash functions.
NIST CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH PROJECT NIST announced a public competition in a Federal Register Notice on November 2, 2007 to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm, called SHA-3, for standardization. The competition was NIST's response to advances made in the cryptanalysis of hash algorithms.
NIST received sixty-four entries from cryptographers around the world by October 31, 2008, and selected fifty-one first-round candidates in December 2008, fourteen second-round candidates in July 2009, and five finalists - BLAKE, Grostl, JH, Keccak and Skein, in December 2010 to advance to the third and final round of the competition.
Throughout the competition, the cryptographic community has provided an enormous amount of feedback. Most of the comments were sent to NIST and a public hash forum; in addition, many of the cryptanalysis and performance studies were published as papers in major cryptographic conferences or leading cryptographic journals. NIST also hosted a SHA-3 candidate conference in each round to obtain public feedback. Based on the public comments and internal review of the candidates, NIST announced Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition on October 2, 2012, and ended the five-year competition.
Reference:
Tipton, Harold, et. al., Officical (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, 2007 edition, page 261.
and
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Md5
and
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html