Basic Cryptography: Hash Function

This paper analyzes the computer security of systems and importance of the digital signature and hashing message algorithm. The proposed digital signature algorithm gives a new technology for producing effective output of digital signature as a result the signing 1 and verifying of signatures are very fast compared to earlier ones. To improve the security and authentication of sending data, this method uses "Message Digest", "IDEA" and "GOST" 2 algorithms. The new message digest algorithm is to provide high security, to transfer data by combination of digital signature algorithm and symmetric key cryptography algorithm. The new hashing algorithm proposed creates a unique digital fingerprint along with symmetric key encryption generated IDEA and GOST algorithms 3,4 . The receiver used the symmetric key and hashing algorithm to form a signature. If this message digest match with the sender digests the message the content will be decrypted and read by sender.

Cryptographic Primitives that Resist Backdooring and Subversion

Hash functions, which can extract message digest from input messages as output, play an important role in digital signature and authentication. Meanwhile, Hash functions are essential in many cryptographic protocols and regimes. With the research becoming more and more in depth, a series of Hash functions is proposed, such as MD series and SHA series. At the same time, the security analysis and attacks against Hash functions are carried out. The security of Hash functions is threatened. In this case, how to improve the security of the Hash functions becomes the primary concern. In this paper, an optical Hash function based on the interaction between light and multiple scattering media is proposed. Unlike most of the traditional Hash functions which are based on mathematical transformations or complex logic operations, this method innovatively takes advantage of the natural random scattering effect of multiple scattering media on coherently modulated light, and realizes the “confusion” and “diffusion” of modulated light, which satisfies the core functional requirement of the Hash function: one-way encoding/encryption with strong security. The photoelectric hybrid system designed by this method can effectively simulate the "compression function" in the Hash function. Combined with the Sobel filter with feature extraction function, the input data of arbitrary length can be compressed and encrypted into the output with a fixed length of 256-bit (Hash value). The principle of the proposed optical Hash function can be described as follows. 1) Two 8-bit images with a size of 16×16 pixels are loaded in SLM<sub>1</sub> (amplitude-only spatial modulator) and SLM<sub>2</sub> (phase-only spatial modulator) respectively. 2) The coherent wavefront is modulated by SLM<sub>1</sub> and SLM<sub>2</sub>, and then propagates on multiple scattering media. 3) A speckle pattern is recorded by CCD because of the confusion of multiple scattering media. 4) The features of the speckle pattern, which is extracted by Sobel filter, serve as the input of the next compression function. For the unpredicted and non-duplicated disorder multiple scattering media, it is tremendously difficult to determine the internal state of the multiple scattering media. Therefore, the proposed optical Hash function is considered to have a high security. A series of simulation results shows that the proposed optical Hash function has a good “avalanche effect” and “collision resistance”, and its security performance is comparable to that of the most widely used traditional Hash functions (MD5 and SHA-1).

Recently, a fast and secure hash function SFHA - 256 has been proposed and claimed as more secure and as having a better performance than the SHA - 256. In this paper an improved version of SFHA - 256 is proposed and analyzed using two parameters, namely the avalanche effect and uniform deviation. The experimental results and further analysis ensures the performance of the newly proposed and improved SFHA-256. From the analysis it can be concluded that the newly proposed algorithm is more secure, efficient, and practical.

A cryptographic hash function H is a function which takes arbitrary length bit strings as input and produces a fixed-length bit string as output; the output is often called a digest, hashcode or hash value. Hash functions are used a lot in computer science, but the crucial difference between a standard hash function and a cryptographic hash function is that a cryptographic hash function should at least have the property of being one-way.

Passwords are barriers that protect unauthorized users from accessing personal information in any application. Protecting passwords is one of the challenging tasks in today's world. Currently, a combination of Username/Password used for authentication for a large number of applications. Malicious users might try to steal/misuse the user's data for unethical purposes. To prevent passwords from stealing, developers prefer to use one-way hash functions. One-way hash functions are theoretically irreversible functions that take as an input variable size text and output fixed-sized text. In reality, hash functions are not collision-resistant. Therefore it is recommended to use passwords and randomly generated text called salt to generate hash values and prevent rainbow tables and dictionary attacks. Passwords are hashed at the client-side and sent across the public channel/network. A salt is a randomly generated alphanumeric text used to concatenate with a password to generate a random hash value. This paper demonstrates how the random generation of salt is dependent on passwords and how hash values are dependent on salt. Further, analysis of the behaviour of passwords and hash values using various tools like Wireshark, Ettercap, and Hydra are presented in the paper.

Cryptographic hash functions are efficiently computable functions that shrink a long input into a shorter output while achieving some of the useful security properties of a random function. The most common type of such hash functions is collision resistant hash functions (CRH), which prevent an efficient attacker from finding a pair of inputs on which the function has the same output.

A cryptographic hash function compresses arbitrarily long messages to digests of a short and fixed length. Most of existing hash functions are designed to evaluate a compression function with a finite domain in a mode of operation, and the compression function itself is often designed from block ciphers or permutations. This modular design approach allows for a rigorous security analysis via means of both cryptanalysis and provable security. We present a survey on the state of the art in hash function security and modular design analysis. We focus on existing security models and definitions, as well as on the security aspects of designing secure compression functions (indirectly) from either block ciphers or permutations. In all of these directions, we identify open problems that, once solved, would allow for an increased confidence in the use of cryptographic hash functions.

In this paper, we present a new generic cryptographic hash function testing tool called Crypto-Precision. It is designed to be adaptable to various Cryptographic Hash Function algorithms and different hash function constructions. We have tested three hash functions; SHA-1, FORK-256 and NewFORK-256.The current version of the tool dynamically generates code for a Hash Function and then tests that Hash Function on the basis of its speed, collision resistance and randomness.KeywordsHash functionMerkle-DamgardMessage digestSHA-1FORK- 256NewFORK-256Collision

P4 introduces a standardized, universal way for data plane programming. Secure and resilient communication typically involves the processing of payload data and specialized cryptographic hash functions. We observe that current P4 targets lack the support for both. Therefore, applications and protocols, which require message authentication codes or hashing structures that are resilient against attacks such as denial-of-service, cannot be implemented. To enable authentication and resilience, we make the case for extending P4 targets with cryptographic hash functions. We propose an extension of the P4 Portable Switch Architecture for cryptographic hashes and discuss our prototype implementations for three different P4 target platforms: CPU, NPU, and FPGA. To assess the practical applicability, we conduct a performance evaluation and analyze the resource consumption. Our prototype implementations show that cryptographic hashing can be integrated efficiently. We cannot identify a single hash function delivering satisfying performance on all investigated platforms. Therefore, we recommend a set of hash functions to optimize target-specific performance.

Recently, formal complexity-theoretic treatment of cryptographic hash functions was suggested. Two primitives of Collision-free hash functions and Universal one-way hash function families have been defined. The primitives have numerous applications in secure information compression, since their security implies that finding collisions is computationally hard. Most notably, Naor and Yung have shown that the most secure signature scheme can be reduced to the existence of universal one-way hash (this, in turn, gives the first trapdoor-less provably secure signature scheme).In this work, we first present reductions from various one-way function families to universal one-way hash functions. Our reductions are general and quite efficient and show how to base universal one-way hash functions on any of the known concrete candidates for one-way functions. We then show equivalences among various definitions of hardness for collision-free hash functions.

We propose a simple and efficient hash function based on programmable elementary cellular automata. Cryptographic hash functions are important building blocks for many cryptographic protocols such as authentication and integrity verification. They have recently brought an exceptional research interest, especially after the increasing number of attacks against the widely used functions as MD5, SHA-1 and RIPEMD, causing a crucial need to consider new hash functions design and conception strategies. The proposed hash function is built using elementary cellular automata that are very suitable for cryptographic applications, due to their chaotic and complex behavior derived from simple rules interaction. The function is evaluated using several statistical tests, while obtained results demonstrate very admissible cryptographic proprieties such as confusion, diffusion capability and high sensitivity to input changes. Furthermore, the hashing scheme can be easily implemented through software or hardware, and provides very competitive running performances.

Secure hash function is used to protect the integrity of the message transferred on the unsecured network. Changes on the bits of the sender’s message are recognized by the message digest produced by the hash function. Hash function is mainly concerned with data integrity, where the data receiver needs to verify whether the message has been altered by eavesdropping by checking the hash value appended with the message. To achieve this purpose, we have to use a secure hash function that is able to calculate the hash value of any message. In this paper, we introduce an alternative hash function based on NP-hard problem. The chosen NP-hard problem is known as Braid Conjugacy problem. This problem has proved to be secure against cryptanalysis attacks.

A common approach for the construction of cryptographic hash functions is to design the algorithm based on an existing symmetric encryption primitive. While there has been extensive research on the design of block cipher-based hash functions, little has been done on the study of design and security of stream cipher-based hash functions (SCH). In this paper we discuss the general construction of stream cipherbased hash functions, devoting special attention to one of the function's crucial components: the message injection function. We define two types of message injection functions, which may be appended to the keystream generator (e.g. a stream cipher) to build an SCH. Based on these constructions, we evaluate the security of simple SCHs whose stream cipher function consists of a LFSR-based filter generator. We see this as an initial step in the more formal study of the security of hash function constructions based on stream ciphers.

Secure password storage is a vital aspect in systems based on password authentication, which is still the most widely used authentication technique, despite some security flaws. In this paper, we propose a password authentication framework that is designed for secure password storage and could be easily integrated into existing authentication systems. In our framework, first, the received plain password from a client is hashed through a cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256). Then, the hashed password is converted into a negative password. Finally, the negative password is encrypted into an encrypted negative password (ENP) using a symmetric-key algorithm (e.g., AES), and multi-iteration encryption could be employed to further improve security. The cryptographic hash function and symmetric encryption make it difficult to crack passwords from ENPs. Moreover, there are lots of corresponding ENPs for a given plain password, which makes precomputation attacks (e.g., lookup table attack and rainbow table attack) infeasible. The algorithm complexity analyses and comparisons show that the ENP could resist lookup table attack and provide stronger password protection under dictionary attack. It is worth mentioning that the ENP does not introduce extra elements (e.g., salt); besides this, the ENP could still resist precomputation attacks. Most importantly, the ENP is the first password protection scheme that combines the cryptographic hash function, the negative password, and the symmetric-key algorithm, without the need for additional information except the plain password.