If you need to verify the authenticity or legimacy of a program on a Microsoft Windows system, e.g., if you need to check whether the program has remained unaltered since it was provided by the developer or check that it came from the developer it is purportedly from, you can use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to give you a greater degree of confidence.
Oftentimes a developer website will list a
cryptographic hash code for a file. The cryptographic hash code allows you
to verify that a program that you have on a system is an unaltered copy of
the program as it was delivered by the developer, since changing even a
single character/byte in a file will result in a different hash code being
calculated for the file when it is checked by a program that can calculate
hash codes for files. To calculate a cryptographic hash code for a file,
you can use a program like
md5sum or,
on a Microsoft Windows system, you can obtain a
SHA-256
hash code value for a file from a
Windows PowerShell prompt using the
Get-AppLockerFileInformation cmdlet.
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