Analyzing the Hashing Files Case Study

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Hashing Files

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Rouse (2005-2015) defines hashing as the changing of a characters' string into normally smaller fixed-length value, which corresponds to the initial string. It is made use of in indexing and retrieving items in databases because the item is easier to find when a shorter hashes key is used than when an original value is used. Hash functions are well-defined functions for converting or representing various kinds of data into comparatively smaller integers. The value of a hash function is a hash value, hash, or hash code.

Importance of Hash Values

Hashing creates sets of numbers representing drives or sets of files. On using hashing, the details about the particular evidence cannot be determined or drawn from the hash code, but an alteration of the evidence results to a change in the hash code. This is demonstrated below through an illustration.

A word document containing 60 lines of text was created. I opted to employ Hasher Lite for this document. On processing the document through Hasher Lite, some numbers and figures appear. They represent the document's static version. The document's hash value had much fewer numbers initially. On altering the document by some alterations to the original file (an addition and removal of a particular amount of text) and then run through a hasher, the resultant hash value and characters were longer (and evidently different).

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The example above illustrates the importance of Hash values. Rowe (2010) states that security and efficiency are some of the main factors that make hash values so important. Employing an optimized hash engine allows an investigator to avoid going through billions of bytes or source data. Such an engine can help tremendously when comparing thousands of hash values. Versions of an object can also be quickly found and so help an inquiry narrow its focus by filtering out unneeded data. The same technique can be used to help screen targets for trace evidence without heavy reliance on file system metadata, which helps process formatted or corrupted targets. Achieving this through traditional means is hard as it requires the investigators to reconstruct objects and parse many formats (Rowe, 2010).The other factor relates to Security. Recreating or engineering the original data cannot be done from the hash codes. This ascertains that there is some level of security because of which the data cannot be drawn directly from the hash value. In computer forensics, hash….....

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