This Image Contains Its Own MD5 Checksum — And It's Kind Of A Big Deal

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Generating checksums-cryptographic hashes such as MD5 or SHA-256 functions for files is hardly anything new and one of the most efficient means to ascertain the integrity of a file, or to check if two files are identical.

However, generating a file containing its own checksum as part of its content is a task quite daunting, if not seemingly impossible due to a paradox involved in the process.

That has not stopped a researcher from creating a PNG image that contains the file's MD5 checksum, visible within the matrix of pixels that make up the image.

[...] BleepingComputer confirmed the checksum of the image in question is 1337e2ef42b9bee8de06a4d223a51337, which are the characters displayed vertically within the image itself.

[...] A checksum is a smaller-sized chunk of data, or even a digit, derived from another set of digital data as a means to detect errors or data corruption that may have occurred. The idea is that any minor change occurring to the original file or piece of data will alter its checksum indicating that the integrity of the data is now void.

[...] You need the checksum or hash of a file first to include this information within the content of the file itself. But doing so by editing or altering the file will effectively change the file's checksum, therefore making this practice seem impossible.

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