Reference
Satyendra, G., Baggili, I., Breitinger, F., & Fischer, A. (2015). An empirical comparison of widely adopted hash functions in digital forensics: does the programming language and operating system make a difference. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law, Daytona Beach, Florida.
Publication type
Paper in Conference Proceedings
Abstract
Hash functions are widespread in computer sciences and have a wide range of applications such as ensuring integrity in cryptographic protocols, structuring database entries (hash tables) or identifying known files in forensic investigations. Besides their cryptographic requirements, a fundamental property of hash functions is efficient and easy computation which is especially important in digital forensics due to the large amount of data that need to be processed in cases. In this paper, we correlate the runtime efficiency of common hashing algorithms (MD5, SHA-family) and their implementation. Our empirical comparison focuses on C-OpenSSL, Python, Ruby, Java on Windows and Linux and C? and WinCrypto API on Windows. The purpose of this paper is to recommend appropriate programming languages and libraries for coding tools that include intensive hashing functionality. In each programming language, we compute the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 digest on datasets from 2 MB to 1 GB. For each language, algorithm and data, we perform multiple runs and compute the average elapsed time. In our experiment, we observed that OpenSSL and languages utilizing OpenSSL (Python and Ruby) perform better across all the hashing algorithms and data sizes on Windows and Linux. However, on Windows, performance of Java (Oracle JDK) and C WinCrypto is comparable to OpenSSL and better for SHA-512.
Persons
Organizational Units
- Institute of Information Systems
- Hilti Chair for Data and Application Security