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Article
The Impact of MD5 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging
Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law
  • Gary C. Kessler, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Prior Publisher
The Association of Digital Forensics, Security and Law (ADFSL)
Publication Date
12-31-2016
Abstract

The Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash is commonly used as for integrity verification in the forensic imaging process. The ability to force MD5 hash collisions has been a reality for more than a decade, although there is a general consensus that hash collisions are of minimal impact to the practice of computer forensics. This paper describes an experiment to determine the results of imaging two disks that are identical except for one file, the two versions of which have different content but otherwise occupy the same byte positions on the disk, are the same size, and have the same hash value.

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Citation Information
Gary C. Kessler. "The Impact of MD5 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging" (2016)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gary_kessler/90/