Hashing is an important facet to the forensics community. While most use cases of hashing are focused on integrity checking, the use of a fuzzy or rolling hash allows us to explore similarity at a byte level. This process can provide insight for malware detection, identification of restricted documents on unapproved resources, and discovery of closely related items based on content only. Through the use of third-party libraries, we are able to lean on the power behind the C-languages with the flexibility of the Python interpreter and build powerful tools that are user and developer friendly. The code for this project can be downloaded from https://packtpub.com/books/content/support.
Metadata, "data about data", has proved to play a valuable role in investigations. In the next chapter, you will learn how to extract embedded metadata from within various files. Some of the file types included are images, audio, and office documents.