HashCheck calculate Hashcode (SHA-1/SHA1, MD5 and MD4). It can be used to examine downloaded files, compare the changes and similarity of files.
Have you downloaded a P2P or torrent file and wants to be sure of its origin and integrity? Hash values are the way to go.
OSx can become unsecure as soon as you start downloading files from the web, with this app you can generate md5 hash and others to check if it is the same provided by the source of download and it wasn't corrupted by another person before reaching you.
Achieve a higher level of security.
A hash function is any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets of variable length to smaller data sets of a fixed length. For example, a person's name, having a variable length, could be hashed to a single integer. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums, checksums or simply hashes.
Hash functions are mostly used to accelerate table lookup or data comparison tasks such as finding items in a database, detecting duplicated or similar records in a large file, finding similar stretches in DNA sequences, and so on.
A hash function should be referentially transparent (stable), i.e., if called twice on input that is "equal" (for example, strings that consist of the same sequence of characters), it should give the same result. This is a contrast in many programming languages that allow the user to override equality and hash functions for an object: if two objects are equal, their hash codes must be the same. This is crucial to finding an element in a hash table quickly, because two of the same element would both hash to the same slot.
All hash functions that map a larger set of data to a smaller set of data cause collisions. Such hash functions try to map the keys to the hash values as evenly as possible because collisions become more frequent as hash tables fill up. Thus, single-digit hash values are frequently restricted to 80% of the size of the table. Depending on the algorithm used, other properties may be required as well, such as double hashing and linear probing. Although the idea was conceived in the 1950s, the design of good hash functions is still a topic of active research.[1]
Hash functions are related to (and often confused with) checksums, check digits, fingerprints, randomization functions, error correcting codes, and cryptographic hash functions. Although these concepts overlap to some extent, each has its own uses and requirements and is designed and optimized differently. The HashKeeper database maintained by the American National Drug Intelligence Center, for instance, is more aptly described as a catalog of file fingerprints than of hash values.
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 utilized 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 hexadecimal number, 32 digits long.
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