Verifying file integrity with "MD5 signatures" (was: Linux Mint (Cinnamon 17.3 ONLY) hacked on Saturday)

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

> And hashes are not just for security. Ms Aurora worked on both ZFS and btrfs. Those filesystems use the hashes for ECC. If the hash for a block is wrong, they get the dupe block (in RAID-1, etc) with a good hash and fix it. Object FS like S3, swift, ceph use hashes also. 
> 
> Collisions are particularly bad for ECC.

Val's kinda awesome, though I haven't seen her around much lately (she
used to be a semi-regular contributor to LWN). And, yeah: in addition to
finding silent corruption, it's also how block-level de-duplication
happens. (Again, hopefully without collisions.) Decent, if not unbroken,
hashes can still serve multiple purposes -- especially ones where
performance is important. 

-Ken 
 
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