File Integrity check tools for computing MD5 and SHA

From the internet, you often download small or large file data files that can be executables, libraries, software’s or media files. Sometimes, you cannot guarantee that the file which you have downloaded from internet is downloaded correctly. There will be several reasons you may receive the corrupted data. For instance, the file, which you have downloaded, may be infected with a virus during file transfer. The other reason may be due to error in the downloading process which may skip the chunk of data during download. Therefore, it is important to perform a file integrity check in order to certify that the downloaded file is in original state. In this article, I would like to introduce file integrity check tools, which will help to validate the current file state.

File Integrity check tools for computing MD5 and SHA:

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As we have already know, every file has unique data contained within it. When you apply a certain cryptographic hash function algorithm such as MD5 and SHA-1 to it, a string value is returned which is only valid for that file in its current state. If even one byte in the file changes, the value given when the check is run again will be different.

For example, The all official windows operating systems images (.iso) will have a computed hash using SHA-1 and this hash key is published in the download page. Whoever downloads these .iso images will recompute the hash key and compare that hash key with the key, which is originally published in the download page. If both matches then it’s confirmed that file download was done properly.

In order to compute the hash keys there are several free tools available. In this article, I will introduce many such tools that compute MD5 and SHA-1 hash keys and provide you the details of respective download locations.

IgorWare Hasher:

IgorWare Hasher is a free SHA-1, MD5 and CRC32 hash generator for Windows. IgorWare Hasher can be used to generate checksum for a single file and verify its integrity by using verification files (.sha, .md5 and .sfv). Verification files will be loaded automatically if they are found.