![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You just need to know the checksum of the original file. You could also use checksums to verify the integrity of any other type of file, from applications to documents and media. For example, Linux distributions often provide checksums so you can verify your Linux ISO properly downloaded before burning it to a disc or putting it on a USB drive. If the resulting checksum matches, you know the file you have is identical.Ĭomputers use checksum-style techniques to check data for problems in the background, but you can also do this yourself. If you know the checksum of the original file, you can run a checksum or hashing utility on it. For example, a file might not have properly downloaded due to network issues, or hard drive problems could have caused corruption in a file on disk. You can use checksums to check files and other data for errors that occur during transmission or storage. A single character difference in the underlying file produces a very different looking checksum. After running Windows 10’s built-in checksumming utility on them, we saw very different checksums. For example, we created two different text files that are almost the same, but one has an exclamation point where the other has a period. Small changes in the file produce very different looking checksums. The input file can be a small 1 MB file or a massive 4 GB file, but either way, you’ll end up with a checksum of the same length. The algorithm uses a cryptographic hash function that takes an input and produces a string (a sequence of numbers and letters) of a fixed length. Typical algorithms used for this include MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512. To produce a checksum, you run a program that puts that file through an algorithm. ![]()
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January 2023
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