homecomputerlab

Today I ran into some problems with a corrupted disk image I was trying to restore to a laptop at work. I decided to implement MD5 checksums against my image repository to avoid any future issues.  MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a widely used cryptographic hash function with a 128-bit hash value. It is still commonly used to check file integrity but was originally employed in a wide variety of security applications although now is considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further security functions after serious flaws were discovered.

To generate a MD5 checksum:
md5sum filename > filename.md5

To verify a MD5 checksum:
md5sum -c filename.md5