Hashing/checksumming for PowerArchiver Standard

[Big_Boss]

PowerArchiver does everything I could hope my archiving program to do, except one thing! If PA had the ability to calculate and create secure checksum files for single files, it would be perfect. It would be very handy to use PA to create a checksum file, and then use PA to compress the checksum file along with the actual file in the same archive and mail it off - or burn it on a disc if that’s required and PA Pro is available on the system. It would be a great feature IMHO. The kind of hash algorithms I’d like to see are SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512. Those are modern and especially the SHA-256 and SHA-512 are really reliable. MD5 is much more common but isn’t so great, really. Just a suggestion!

[spwolf]

did you request something like this recently or was it someone else?

[Big_Boss]

Sorry if this has been requested before! I didn’t remember to do a search before making a new thread. :o I’m pretty sure I haven’t requested this before though. So… it wasn’t me, it was someone else!

Hmm, maybe it was this one that you remembered. http://www.powerarchiver.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1693 That thread asks for MD5 though. I’m kind of an elitist, and would prefer better algorithms like SHA-256 and SHA-512.

[spwolf]

it is interesting though… many possibilities here :-).

Why do you want it to be inside the archive? How do you check hashes?

[Big_Boss]

Sometimes I have a need to put a checksum file inside an archive for various reasons, but I don’t need the checksum file to automatically included in the archive, I can just put it in the archive myself. Right now I have to use cumbersome command line tools to create and verify the so far quite rarely used but very secure SHA-256 and SHA-512 hashes (for MD5 and SHA-1 there are many GUI apps that work, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt if PA had those too, in addition to SHA-256 and 512).

So what I would like to see is a simple Create checksum/Verify checksum feature in PowerArchiver. It could be in the PA Shell Extensions, so you could right click on a file that you want to calculate checksums of in Windows Explorer and then choose Create SHA-256 checksum from the shell extension, and PA would then create the checksum file in the current folder. The verify checksum would work likewise: right-click on the checksum file, select verify. It would be very handy! And if it also worked inside PowerArchiver’s main view with a right click, that would be great too.

[moles42]

sounds like a ‘must have’ to me…:)
next release maybe ?..:rolleyes:

[Big_Boss]

I think it would be great. And I don’t know of any other archiver that allows checksumming with SHA-2 family algorithms. Actually I don’t know many GUI apps that can do these more secure SHA-2 family checksums like SHA-256 and SHA-512. Having those in PowerArchiver would be very useful - I wouldn’t have to mess with the command line stuff anymore so often. In an ideal world tools for checksumming would come with Windows, but since Microsoft won’t do that…

[drteeth]

@moles42:

sounds like a ‘must have’ to me…:)
next release maybe ?..:rolleyes:

Hi!

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me too.

Regards

DrT