Talk:Checksum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
i just have a question about the checksum when the checksum will be useful to detect changes to the file???????
Checksum is only used to check that the data sent is correct, it doesnt change anything!
In order to ensure content accuracy you should consider using something like MD5 or SHA-1, which are cryptographic hashing algorithms and in wide use for such purposes.
Checksums are good at detecting accidental corruption (e.g. that introduced by signal noise) but the algorithm is sufficiently predictable that it forms no defence against malicious attack. For that sort of purpose, a cryptographic hash function should instead be used, which is a kind of checksumming algorithm that has the additional property that it is pretty easy to go from the data to the hash, but very hard to find some data that hashes to a particular value. (Or at least that's the way it is supposed to work; SHA-256 is the current recommendation for crypto-hash functions as MD5 has been broken and SHA-1 is believed breakable. It should be possible to reference these; they were results from a team in China, and were fairly widely reported even outside the security conference where their papers were.) 82.42.250.222 00:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
I accidentally typed checksun into the search field. Is there a way I could put in, did you mean checksum? Like google does?
