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Final Project Part 01 - Finding an Open Source Package

The final project of this course has been split into 2 major parts, the first part is as follows:
  • Find an open source software package with a hash or checksum function that compiles to machine code.
  • Benchmark the performance on an AArch64 system.
  • Identify how you plan to optimize the function.
 It turns out that finding the open soure software package took much longer than expected. Typing in google some combination of "open source software with hash function" clearly produces nothing. These were the strategies I employed below to find my package:
  1.  Reverse search using Wikipedia.
  • Start here at the list of hash functions.
  • Pick one, look at the External links and References sections for an implementation that is open source.

      2.  Install open source packages from the Free Software Directory here.
  • Pick a package and use wget on our AArch64 system if applicable.
  • grep -Ri for hash/checksum and see if it returned anything useful.

      3.  Google search "(hash/checksum) hash c".
  • Search through approximately 5 pages per result to see if any packages appear.

Ironically, although option 1 followed by 2 sounds the most probable to find a package, option 3 brought me to the package I chose. Wikipedia unfortunately offered only plenty of information regarding the way the hash works or it's vulnerabilities and very little on any implementations. Option 2 after many packages began to feel hopeless and the descriptions give you no indication of whether you will find a hash/checksum function in them. After typing in sha1 hash c I came across clib here.

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