# Differential Analysis of a Cryptographic Hashing Algorithm HBC-256
## 1 Introduction  
Currently, the collection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the social system that supports them are often perceived as an ecosystem, or more precisely, a cyber-ecosystem. The components of the cyber ecosystem are constantly maintained and form a dense network of dependencies and information processing-storage, exchange, authentication and assured destruction. One of the biggest challenges facing the cryptography community around the world in this ecosystem is to ensure the confidentiality, authentication, and integrity of the messages we want to send over an insecure data transmission channel such as the Internet. Online banking transactions would not be secure enough and password-protected systems would not exist without the use of hash functions. Cell phone systems would lose their advantages without this additional locking feature, which is the application of hash functions (SHA-1). The concept of a hash function was introduced in 1976, with the invention of public key cryptography by [PERSON] [PERSON] [1]. In the modern information world, one of the key values is to ensure the reliability and security of information. Many information systems, including low-resource IoT devices, use various cryptographic transformations to ensure information security during data storage and transmission. One of the basic cryptographic transformations involved in various security issues are hash functions, one-way mathematical transformations that convert an arbitrary input data array into a unique sequence of fixed length. Hash functions are very widespread. Hash functions are used to store passwords during authentication, protect data in file verification systems, encode information in the blockchain, etc. There are many cryptographic algorithms these days. They are different and differ in complexity, bit depth, cryptographic reliability, and features of work. Hashing algorithms appearedmore than half a century ago. Moreover for many years, from a fundamental point of view, little has changed. However, as a result of their development, data has acquired many new properties, so their application in the field of information technology has already become ubiquitous [2]. The cryptographic hash function must meet the requirements of the \"one-way\" principle and collision resistance. One way means that the method of calculating the hash value from a given message is simple, but computationally impossible to generate any message that gives an initial hash value. Collision robustness means that it is extremely difficult to find two messages with the same hash function value [3; 4]. In blockchain technology, the hash is also used to verify the integrity of data. The hash acts as a guarantee of the integrity of the chain of transactions (payments). Each new transaction block references the hash of the previous block in the registry. The hash of the block itself depends on all the transactions in the block, but instead of sequentially passing transactions to the hash function, they assembled into a single hash value using a binary hash tree. Thus, hashes are used as a replacement for pointers in common data structures: linked lists and binary trees. By using hashes, the overall state of the blockchain, and all transactions ever performed, and their sequence, can be expressed by a single number: a hash of the newest block. Therefore, the hash immutability property of a single block guarantees the immutability of the entire blockchain [5]. Algorithms for calculating hash values like other types of cryptographic algorithms are a fundamental element of many information security systems and protocols. Given the importance of the strength of the applied algorithms and trust in them, many countries (commonwealths of countries) have developed or are developing national cryptographic standards. A widely used algorithm for calculating hash values is the United States standard called Keccak (SHA-3) [6].