Checksum Compare

About the Checksum Compare

Comparing two long hexadecimal strings by eye is where mistakes happen; a single transposed character is easy to miss. This tool compares the hash you computed with the one a download page published and tells you plainly whether they match. The comparison ignores case and surrounding whitespace, since checksums are printed in both upper and lower case.

The check is a plain equality test after case is normalised and whitespace stripped, which covers the ways checksums actually reach you: uppercase in one project's release notes, lowercase in another, wrapped across lines, or pasted out of a SHA256SUMS file with a filename trailing behind it. There is deliberately no fuzzy or partial matching, because a partial match on a digest carries no information. Two values either agree completely or the underlying data is different.

Worth keeping in mind: a match only proves the file agrees with the value you were handed. An attacker who can alter the download can usually alter the checksum printed on the same page, which is why serious projects sign their checksum file with a GPG key and publish the key elsewhere. Verify that signature where one exists, and prefer a sum published somewhere other than the download host. Use it after the File Hash Generator to confirm a download. A match means the file is intact; a mismatch means it was corrupted or altered and should not be trusted. When they differ, the tool shows both values aligned so you can see where. For pasted text rather than a file, the All Hash Generator produces every digest at once.

How to use

1. Paste your computed hash on the left.
2. Paste the published hash in the toolbar.
3. Read whether they match.