From the course: Security Testing Essential Training

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File integrity checking

File integrity checking

From the course: Security Testing Essential Training

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File integrity checking

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- File integrity checking is one of the simplest security assessment tasks to perform, although it's also one of the most complicated tasks to prepare for. At its core, file integrity checking involves comparing two values. That's it. If they're the same, then everything's okay, but if they're different, then the client needs to determine why and provide an explanation. You could do this comparison manually, although comparing two values is a pretty basic function that you could perform with a very small shell script. The tools that we use to automate this task often use the files hash value to perform this comparison. And what's a hash value? Well, a hash value is like a digital fingerprint, one that's unique to each file. File integrity checkers use a hashing function, something like MD5 or SHA-1 to generate a fairly long string of characters based on the file they're checking. Reliable hashing functions do this in a way that ensures no two hash values are identical, just like…

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