The outcomes of forensic investigations can have a severe impact on organizations and individuals. Depending on your field of work, your investigation can become evidence in the court.
Consequently, the integrity of forensic evidence has to be ensured not just when collecting the evidence, but also throughout the entire handling and analysis. Usually, the very first step in a forensic investigation is gathering the evidence. Normally, this is done using a bitwise copy of the original media. All the subsequent analysis is performed on this forensic copy.
To ensure that a forensic copy is actually identical to the original media, hash sums of the media and from the forensic copy are made. These hash sums must match to prove that the copy is exactly like the original data. Nowadays, it has become common to use at least two different cryptographic hash algorithms to minimize the risk of hash collisions and harden the overall...