Answer by Kamil Maciorowski for Does an identical cryptographic hash or...
This answer is intended to be a handy map of scenarios that can or cannot happen, and reasonings you can apply. Refer to other answers to learn why hash functions work this way. After you choose a hash...
View ArticleAnswer by gnasher729 for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
Let's look at this in a practical way. Instead of saying "the hashes are identical" I'll say "I wrote a computer program that calculates the hashes of two files and prints out whether they are the same...
View ArticleAnswer by ibft2 for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
The files are probably identical if their hashes are identical. You can increase confidence by modifying both files in an identical way (e.g. put the same value in the same unused cell) then comparing...
View ArticleAnswer by Giulio Muscarello for Does an identical cryptographic hash or...
To add on the other answers, here are many examples of couples of files with the same MD5 hash and different content.
View ArticleAnswer by user207421 for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
When the hashes are identical, does this mean that the file contents are 1:1 the same?No. If the hashes are different, it does mean that the contents are different. Equal hashcodes do not imply equal...
View ArticleAnswer by Chad for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
On the Windows command line, you can use the comp utility to determine whether two files are exactly the same. For example:comp fileone.xls filetwo.xls
View ArticleAnswer by Andrew Henle for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum...
I have 2 excel documents and I want to check if they are exactly the same, apart from the file name. From a practical perspective, directly comparing the files to find out if they're different will be...
View ArticleAnswer by Stilez for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
The answer for this OP has been given but might benefit from a summary.If you want to check whether two files are the same, a lot depends on whether or not the files and hashes are under your control....
View ArticleAnswer by David Rice for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
Your question is backwards, though - let's assume that the hash means that they have the same data (which isn't 100% guaranteed, but is good enough for a lifetime of comparing files every second to not...
View ArticleAnswer by Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' for Does an identical cryptographic...
If two files have the same MD5 hash, and they haven't both been specially crafted, then they're identical. How hard it is to craft files with the same MD5 hash depends on the file format, I don't know...
View ArticleAnswer by mckenzm for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
NO. Different values guarantee the files are different. The same values are not a guarantee the files are the same. It is relatively easy to find examples using CRC16.On the balance of probability with...
View ArticleAnswer by styrofoam fly for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum...
Hashes such as MD5 or SHA have fixed length, lets say it's 300 alphanumeric characters (in reality they are shorter and don't use the whole set of alphanumeric characters).Lets say that files are made...
View ArticleAnswer by jah for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
For your purposes, yes, identical hashes means identical files.As other answers make clear, it's possible to construct 2 different files which result in the same hash and MD5 is not particularly robust...
View ArticleAnswer by Attie for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
It's a probability game... hashes are able to represent a finite number of values.If we consider a hypothetical (and very weak) 8-bit hashing algorithm, then this can represent 256 distinct values. As...
View ArticleAnswer by LawrenceC for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
When the hashes are identical, does this mean that the file contents are 1:1 the same?All files are a collection of bytes (values 0-255). If two files MD5 hashes match, both those collections of bytes...
View ArticleAnswer by user for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two...
In practice, yes, an identical cryptographic hash means the files are the same, as long as the files were not crafted by an attacker or other malicious entity. The odds of random collisions with any...
View ArticleAnswer by user477799 for Does an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for...
Short answer: A cryptographic hash is supposed to help you be reasonably confident that files with matching hashes are the same. Unless deliberately crafted, the chances of two slightly different files...
View ArticleDoes an identical cryptographic hash or checksum for two files mean they are...
I have 2 excel documents and I want to check if they are exactly the same, apart from the file name. For example, the files are called fileone.xls and filetwo.xls. Apart from the file names, their...
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