Yesterday’s Blog post demonstrated how the File Fabric Audit events could be stored on a HyperLedger Fabric BlockChain solution. Today’s post compliments that and shows how each file’s integrity can be validated by a checksum.
A File Fabric policy can be set to calculate a checksum for a file. The Fabric uses a simple MD5 hash for the checksum which is perfectly adequate for the purpose of confirming file integrity and authenticity.
The feature can be turned on from the ‘User Governance’ section of ‘Organizational policies’.
Once it is turned on we can upload a file to see how the policy feature works:
We can then check our Audit Logs, either through the File Fabric directly or through the HyperLedger Fabric (if the Audit logs have been stored on the distributed ledger.)
Here we can see that the Audit Logs have calculated a unique checksum for the file:
If we later have cause to check the authenticity of the file, or a variant of the file, we can easily calculate the checksum to validate the file authenticity.
There are many free web apps, and desktop apps able to do this but we will download the file that we just uploaded and simply use the MacOS Terminal Application.
On running the OSX MD5 terminal function we can can see that the checksum is identical to the one in the SME Audit Log, as we would expect, validating the authenticity of the file.
The Enterprise File Fabric can be used in this fashion with on-premises file stores ie. Windows Files, NAS, SAN, Object Storage in addition to on-cloud file stores such as Amazon S3, Azure, Google Storage, DropBox, Office 365, Box, Google Drive, etc.
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