It has been a year since Atola Technology introduced the concept of Segmented hashing, presented the open-source tool Seghash and supported it on its flagship device, Atola Insight Forensic.
While this method of hashing has a number of benefits for forensic specialists, among its strongest advantages is its applicability to damaged drives.For one, this non-linear hashing method allows calculating hashes of the good areas of evidence media, while bad areas that are impossible to read and image, are left out of the calculation.
Secondly, if your acquired evidence image is damaged at some point in the future, with the regular linear hashes you will get a hash mismatch upon verification, and the entire image becomes useless, whereas with segmented hashes only the hash of the damaged segment will become invalid. For example, in the case of a 4TB hard drive, if the default 4GB segment size is applied, one invalid hash will account for only 0.1% of the drive, while the remaining 99.9% of hashes can still be verified.
“Segmented hashing being a valuable feature for investigators dealing with both good and damaged hard drives has made it a great enhancement to Atola Insight Forensic, a duplicator with unbeatable imaging speed and damaged hard drive capabilities,” said Dmitry Postrigan, the chief executive officer of Atola Technology. “We will continue to listen to our customers and provide innovative solutions to suit their needs in efficient forensic technologies.”
Atola Insight Forensic’s Segmented hashing feature supports MD5, SHA1, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 hash functions. Seghash, Atola’s open-source tool, which is written in the Go and has ben released under MIT license, works on Windows, Linux and macOS. Has published the tool on its Github account and encouraged adoption of the segmented hashing algorithm by software vendors who want to provide their users with a superior hashing option. For more information about it please read this blog: http://blog.atola.com/calculating-segmented-hash-of-a-damaged-drive/
About Atola Technology
Atola Technology is a hardware and software development company founded in 2003 and based in Vancouver, Canada. The company’s software engineers, including its founder and CEO Dmitry Postrigan have deep expertise in data and firmware recovery, and focus on creating highly efficient and user-friendly hard drive imaging tools for the global forensic market.
