evolution of cryptographic hashing
Hash functions were invented in Computer Science as a tool for fast searching, where collisions were a desired property as long as they tend to occur with uniform probability distribution. The invention of digital signatures was one of the main stimuli for constructing cryptographic hash functions. This time cryptographic hash functions need to satisfy few strict properties. The first is that the functions should take a message of arbitrary length and produce a digest of a fixed length. The functions should also be one-way or their inversion should be an intractable task. Also they should be collision resistant, i.e. finding a pair of colliding messages should be intractable. This talk is going to discuss properties of cryptographic hashing, their structure and generic attacks. We are going to overview three basic methods of cryptographic hash function constructions, namely, hashing based on block ciphers, custom-designed hashing and finally, hashing based on intractable problems. The talk is going to be concluded by an update on the progress of the SHA-3 call.
cryptographic hashing digital signatures cryptography