Approximate matching : definition and terminology

Abstract

This publication has been developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to further its statutory responsibilities under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), Public Law (P.L.) 107-347. NIST is responsible for developing information security standards and guidelines, including minimum requirements for Federal information systems, but such standards and guidelines shall not apply to national security systems without the express approval of appropriate Federal officials exercising policy authority over such systems. This guideline is consistent with the requirements of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130, Section 8b(3), Securing Agency Information Systems, as analyzed in Circular A 130, Appendix IV: Analysis of Key Sections. Supplemental information is provided in Circular A-130, Appendix III, Security of Federal Automated Information Resources.Nothing in this publication should be taken to contradict the standards and guidelines made mandatory and binding on Federal agencies by the Secretary of Commerce under statutory authority. Nor should these guidelines be interpreted as altering or superseding the existing authorities of the Secretary of Commerce, Director of the OMB, or any other Federal official. This publication may be used by nongovernmental organizations on a voluntary basis and is not subject to copyright in the United States. Attribution would, however, be appreciated by NIST.

Towards Syntactic Approximate Matching - A Pre-Processing Experiment

“…similarity hashing or fuzzy hashing) is a rather new domain and probably started with an idea from Kornblum (2006) named context-triggered piecewise hashing. Subsequently, a small community emerged around that field and presented new algorithms, finally coming up with a definition in 2014 -Special Publication 800-168 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, Breitinger, Guttman, et al (2014)). …”

“…In order to overcome this drawback, the community came up with approximate matching, which allows investigators to calculate the probability of similarity between two or more similar objects, such as media, stream, and other files. According to the definition from Breitinger, Guttman, McCarrin, Roussev, and White (2014), "approximate matching methods can be placed in one of three main categories":…”

File Detection on Network Traffic Using Approximate Matching

“…Approximate matching is a rather new working field but has been proven to be useful for similar input detection (e.g., different versions of a file) or embedded objects detection (e.g., a jpg within a Word document). Furthermore, approximate matching can be used for fragment detection where a fragment is a small piece of a file (Breitinger, Guttman, McCarrin, & Roussev, 2014).…”

Similarity Digest Search: A Survey and Comparative Analysis of Strategies to Perform Known File Filtering Using Approximate Matching

“…Approximate matching functions are defined by NIST [7] as a "promising technology designed to identify similarities between two digital artifacts. It is used to find objects that resemble each other or find objects that are contained in another object."…”