Wednesday, January 28, 2009

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/18/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. How reliable is MD5 or other hash signatures, in view of recent findings?
A. 
  • Security researchers were able to generate MD5 collisions and use them to forge SSL certificates. This means that two different files had the same MD5 signatures. It took a lot of computing power and research effort;
  • MD5 can still be used for deduping, since manipulating MD5 for deduping requires to much effort, and hiding the data can be achieved in other, easier ways;
  • MD5 collision can potentially be used to hide key evidence, by replacing the contents of the file and giving it the same MD5 signature, but this forgery also can be detected, or done in other, simpler ways – if one wants to take the risk of forging altogether;
  • currently SHA1 is considered more secure and can be used without objections, if computational resources allow it.

Q. Inexpensive and reliable OST to PST conversion software ?
A. 
  • http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpff/ 
  • http://www.transend.com/ 
  • http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/exchange-ost-recovery.html 
  • Review the OST file natively in PST Walker http://www.pstwalker.com 
  • OfficeRecovery  http://www.officerecovery.com/

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

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