Domain extender for collision resistant hash functions: Improving upon Merkle-Damgård iteration

  • Authors:
  • Palash Sarkar

  • Affiliations:
  • Applied Statistics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203, B.T. Road, Kolkata, 700108, India

  • Venue:
  • Discrete Applied Mathematics
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.04

Visualization

Abstract

We study the problem of securely extending the domain of a collision resistant compression function. A new construction based on directed acyclic graphs is described. This generalizes the usual iterated hashing constructions. Our main contribution is to introduce a new technique for hashing arbitrary length strings. Combined with DAG-based hashing, this technique yields a new hashing algorithm. The amount of padding and the number of invocations of the compression function required by the new algorithm is smaller than the general Merkle-Damgard algorithm.