Information Security Commons^™

Towards Syntactic Approximate Matching - A Pre-Processing Experiment, Doowon Jeong, Frank Breitinger, Hari Kang, Sangjin Lee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Over the past few years the popularity of approximate matching algorithms (a.k.a. fuzzy hashing) has increased. Especially within the area of bytewise approximate matching, several algorithms were published, tested and improved. It has been shown that these algorithms are powerful, however they are sometimes too precise for real world investigations. That is, even very small commonalities (e.g., in the header of a le) can cause a match. While this is a desired property, it may also lead to unwanted results. In this paper we show that by using simple pre-processing, we signicantly can in uence the outcome. Although our test …