Treffer: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF WIDELY ADOPTED HASH FUNCTIONS IN DIGITAL FORENSICS: DOES THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE AND OPERATING SYSTEM MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

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 needs to be processed when working on 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 processes. In each programming language, we compute the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 digest on datasets from 2MB 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Proceedings of the Conference on Digital Forensics, Security & Law is the property of Association of Digital Forensics, Security & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)