Getting started

All libraries used in this script are present in Python’s standard library. For generating hashes of files and other data sources, we implement the hashlib library. This built-in library has support for common algorithms, such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and more. As of the writing of this book, many tools still leverage the MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms, though the current recommendation is to use SHA-256 at a minimum. Alternatively, one could use multiple hashes of a file to further decrease the odds of a hash collision. While we'll showcase a few of these algorithms, there are other, less commonly used, algorithms available.