Context Triggered Piecewise Hashes (CTPH) and SSDEEP

It has been a while since I posted anything here, but then life had another plans for me in past three years. Anyways cutting short the crap, today I will discuss about hashes. To be more precise, CONTEXT TRIGGERED PIECEWISE HASHES (CTPH).

This term came into my mind when I was going through the Pyramid of Pain, which happens to be a simple diagram that shows the relationship between the types of indicators you might use to detect an adversary’s activities and how much pain it will cause them when you are able to deny those indicators to them. We can discuss Pyramid of pain some other day. Lets’s talk about hashes first.

We have all used cryptographic hashes to determine the integrity of the files, vastly used during any data forensics investigation. So if a single bit is changed in the input, it will change tha hashed output value drastically. But with the advancement of attacks, it is highly possible to change a bit of an malware to fail in the cryptographic match by a forensic profession even with keeping the functionality of an malware intact. Read more