Checksum fingerprints

What are they?

The checksum fingerprints for the snapshots provide the ability to verify the downloaded Research Object hasn’t been modified. This could either be through malicious tampering or has simply been passed around and modified without your knowledge before you received it. The checksum allows you to double check this against the snapshot on SEEK.

Verifying the MD5 or SHA1

For most cases MD5 is fine. There is some potential for 2 different files to produce the same checksum, but this is unusual and difficult to manipulate. We also provide a SHA1 sum which is less likely to produce the same checksum for different files.


SEEK snapshots are usually public and available, so you shouldn’t be too worried about uploading to an online service. In many cases the file isn’t even uploaded but is checked within the browser.

An example is OnlineMD5


There are many tools available to download to check the sum, which can be found by searching online for “md5sum Windows”.

Popular tools include HashTab and md5sums


For MD5

md5sum <filename>

For SHA1

sha1sum <filename>

This will return and display the checksum

Mac OS X

For MD5

openssl dgst -md5 <filename> | cat

For SHA1

openssl dgst -sha1 <filename> | cat

This will return and display the checksum