What is hashing and how I can use it in forensics?
Cryptographic hashes are a family of mathmatical functions that reduce an input down to a small, fixed size output. They can be used to fingerprint known good or bad files and then compare those fingerprints against unknown files. Any new files that match the known good files can be eliminated from further analysis. Any files that match the known bad files, well, should be noted and investigated! See the section on hash algorithms and hashing programs for more information.
