Checksum

A checksum is a small-sized datum from a block of digital data for the purpose of detecting errors which may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. It is usually applied to an installation file after it is received from the download server. By themselves, checksums are often used to verify data integrity but are not relied upon to verify data authenticity.

The actual procedure which yields the checksum, given a data input is called a checksum function or checksum algorithm. Depending on its design goals, a good checksum algorithm will usually output a significantly different value, even for small changes made to the input. This is especially true of cryptographic hash functions, which may be used to detect many data corruption errors and verify overall data integrity; if the computed checksum for the current data input matches the stored value of a previously computed checksum, there is a very high probability the data has not been accidentally altered or corrupted.

Checksum functions are related to hash functions, fingerprints, randomization functions, and cryptographic hash functions. However, each of those concepts has different applications and therefore different design goals. For instance a function returning the start of a string can provide a hash appropriate for some applications but will never be a suitable checksum. Checksums are used as cryptographic primitives in larger authentication algorithms. For cryptographic systems with these two specific design goals, see HMAC.

Check digits and parity bits are special cases of checksums, appropriate for small blocks of data (such as Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, computer words, single bytes, etc.). Some error-correcting codes are based on special checksums which not only detect common errors but also allow the original data to be recovered in certain cases.

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