To complete this Inline Activity : Read the Wikipedia article regarding Checksum
ID: 3881806 • Letter: T
Question
To complete this Inline Activity:
Read the Wikipedia article regarding Checksums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Read the Wikipedia article regarding MD5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Read the Wikipedia article regarding SHA-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Download this short text file to your computer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9touz7pppyvk3w0/DeAnza-2018W-CIS64E-IA030-040-Message-One.txt?dl=0 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Download this short text file to your computer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5msia3k9gfzax1c/DeAnza-2018W-CIS64E-IA030-040-Message-Two.txt?dl=0 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Download this short text file to your computer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ibi5v0r95bazged/DeAnza-2018W-CIS64E-IA030-040-Message-Three.txt?dl=0 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
As applicable for the Operating System on your computer (e.g., macOS, Windows, Linux), find out how to execute MD5; here are some hints:
Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/889768/how-to-compute-the-md5-or-sha-1-cryptographic-hash-values-for-a-file (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
macOS/Linux: Open a Terminal window. Type MAN MD5 and read the instructions.
Run MD5 using "Message-One" as input
Run MD5 using "Message-Two" as input.
Run MD5 using "Message-Three" as input.
Determine why the three MD5 values are not the same.
In as little space and time possible--in the space below, answer these questions:How many characters did MD5 return for:
Message-One?
Message-Two?
Message-Three?
What were the last four (right-most) characters MD5 returned for:
Message-One?
Message-Two?
Message-Three?
Why the three MD5 values are not the same?
What is the value to you--as an Information Systems Professional working in Large-Scale, Distributed Systems environments--in knowing about MD5 (SHA-1, CRC, or the multitude of other mechanisms used to calculate Checksums)?
Explanation / Answer
Characters returned by MD5 for all the three messages are 32.
Last 4 characters returned by MD5 for:
Message-One : cfeb
Message-Two : 2d27
Message-Three : 1ec8
The value returned by MD5 isn't same for any of the file, though the message and message length is the same. Looking closely, we discover that message-one was written in standard english using the standard grammar rules.
Message-two was written in all uppercase letters, and similarily in Message-Three the question mark after the first sentence was changed to simply a full-stop. With changes in these the md5 file reflects different values as for md5 algorithm these are all different. We use md5 to trace if the file underwent any changes in its path, thus, MD5 is case sensitive and alters its output value to even a slightest change in the given text file. Thus though the message was same in all the three files, its representation was different, and thus, different md5 values.
Checksums thus help to verify the integrity of the file, it helps the proffessionals to quickly check if the file sent was undamaged and unaltered. This proves useful in diagnosing the data line and if it's faulty.
Thus checksums proves useful in network diagnosis.
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