ssdeep Python Wrapper

This is a straightforward Python wrapper for ssdeep by Jesse Kornblum, which is a library for computing context triggered piecewise hashes (CTPH). Also called fuzzy hashes, CTPH can match inputs that have homologies. Such inputs have sequences of identical bytes in the same order, although bytes in between these sequences may be different in both content and length.

How to use it

To compute a fuzzy hash, use hash function:

>>> import ssdeep
>>> hash1 = ssdeep.hash('Also called fuzzy hashes, Ctph can match inputs that have homologies.')
>>> hash1
'3:AXGBicFlgVNhBGcL6wCrFQEv:AXGHsNhxLsr2C'
>>> hash2 = ssdeep.hash('Also called fuzzy hashes, CTPH can match inputs that have homologies.')
>>> hash2
'3:AXGBicFlIHBGcL6wCrFQEv:AXGH6xLsr2C'

The compare function returns the match between 2 hashes, an integer value from 0 (no match) to 100.

>>> ssdeep.compare(hash1, hash2)
22

More examples are available in the python-ssdeep documentation.

Install

If all requirements are met it is possible to install the wrapper by using pip or easy_install.

$ pip install ssdeep

The build will fail if the ssdeep library isn’t installed. To use the included version of the ssdeep library use the following command.

$ BUILD_LIB=1 pip install ssdeep

For more information have a look at the python-ssdeep documentation.

Tested on …

• CentOS 7

• Debian 8, 9

• Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 18.04

Documentation

Feel free to use the prebuild python-ssdeep documentation or use the steps below to build the documentation.

$ cd docs
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ make html

Licensing

The code is licensed under the terms of the LGPLv3+.

This wrapper includes the unchanged source distribution of ssdeep version 2.14.1. It is licensed under the GPLv2.