There are many ways to find out whether a file has been tempered with or has been somehow changed. One way is to check its digital certificate which will fail to verify if the file has been modified. But if the file was not digitally signed, then we can compare the file hashes of the original file with the copy of the file that we possess. If the file hashes do not match then file is surely modified.
File hashes are numbers calculated using special algorithms. For the given input data (such as files or text messages), they will be same no matter on which device they are calculated on. For calculating these hashes, we can use a freeware called DeadHash.
DeadHash works on Android, Linux and on Windows. For the Windows computers, it is available in portable version too. The program supports drag-n-drop for selecting files. You can drop only one file at a time. If you want to calculate hash for a text message then you can either type it in or copy-paste it.
As soon as you click on the “Calculate” button, it calculates and displays the hashes in the window. By default, it finds all the hashes including MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, RIPEMD-160 etc. It can also find checksums using CRC algorithms such as CRC1, CRC8, CRC16, CRC24 and CRC32. These hashes and checksums can be exported to a file or copied to the clipboard.
The program comes with comparison tools for comparing two files or two text messages. For comparing the files, it first calculates their hashes and then it tells you if they are different by how much percentage. Similarly, you can compare two pieces of text messages and quickly find out if they are different.
In the settings, we can choose to have a light or dark visual modes. Then there are a dozen colorful themes to be used with the DeadHash window. We can also pick many supported languages from the DeadHash settings window.
You can download DeadHash from https://codedead.com/software/deadhash.