Simple File Verification

Simple file verification, commonly abbreviated SFV, is a plain-text file format, using the .sfv extension, for storing CRC-32 checksums of files so that their integrity can later be checked. An SFV file lists one line per file in the pattern filename followed by checksum, with lines beginning with a semicolon treated as comments; verification compares each file's freshly computed CRC-32 value against the value recorded in the SFV file to detect accidental corruption from causes such as faulty storage media, transmission errors or copying mistakes. Because CRC-32 offers no collision resistance, SFV cannot authenticate a file or guard against deliberate tampering, since an attacker can construct a different file with the same checksum; it remains popular chiefly because it is much faster to compute than cryptographic alternatives such as MD5 or SHA-1, and tools such as the cksfv utility are used to check SFV files on Linux systems. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/