MD5 Hashing Xtra v1.1 (FREE)		November.9.2003

The MD5 Hashing Xtra is a cross platform xtra for Macromedia Director. It provides developers the ability to hash files and messages using the RSA MD5 message digest algorithm. This provides developers a tool to convert a file of variable length into a handy 128 bit string reference. By changing a single character in the same source file will produce a completely different 128 bit string reference.

I've started writing this xtra on a project where I needed to authenticate files on a hard drive. There was a need to check for file tampering and there was no xtra that had similar abilities. Using file date and/or file size was not adequate. Messing with dates on a Windows platform means messing with time zones, and actual file sizes are tied to the user's file allocation table and cluster size. MD5 hashing is also much more dependable than CRC32. CRC is a quicker file checksum algorithm, however its accuracies is not as dependable compared to MD5.

(NEW) Version 1.1 is now Windows and Macintosh compatible. Macintosh version includes a classic version and a carbon version. Users of windows version 1.0 are encouraged to update to this version 1.1 as well. There are plenty of improvements, including speed of execution, in version 1.1.

The complete source code to MD5 Hashing Xtra's version 1.0 still available for download. The source code to the xtra is completely free to download, use, edit, and/or distribute.