International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A hash function maps a variable length input into a fixed length output. The hash functions that are used in the information security related applications are referred as cryptographic hash functions. Hash functions are being used as building blocks of many complex cryptographic mechanisms and protocols. Construction of a hash function consists of two components. First component is a compression function and the second component is a domain extender. The various hash function design philosophies try to design the compression function from different angles. Two major categories of hash functions are: dedicated hash functions, and block cipher-based hash functions. These two kinds of design philosophies have been revisited in this paper. Two dedicated has functions from MD4 family - MD4, and SHA-256 constructions have been detailed in this paper. To limit the scope of this paper in this framework, discussions on attacks on hash functions, and SHA-3 finalists have been excluded here.

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