Paper 2009/170

Analysis of Property-Preservation Capabilities of the ROX and ESh Hash Domain Extenders

Mohammad Reza Reyhanitabar, Willy Susilo, and Yi Mu

Abstract

Two of the most recent and powerful multi-property-preserving (MPP) hash domain extension transforms are the Ramdom-Oracle-XOR (ROX) transform and the Enveloped Shoup (ESh) transform. The former was proposed by Andreeva et al. at ASIACRYPT 2007 and the latter was proposed by Bellare and Ristenpart at ICALP 2007. In the existing literature, ten notions of security for hash functions have been considered in analysis of MPP capabilities of domain extension transforms, namely CR, Sec, aSec, eSec (TCR), Pre, aPre, ePre, MAC, PRF, PRO. Andreeva et al. showed that ROX is able to preserve seven properties; namely collision resistance (CR), three flavors of second preimage resistance (Sec, aSec, eSec) and three variants of preimage resistance (Pre, aPre, ePre). Bellare and Ristenpart showed that ESh is capable of preserving five important security notions; namely CR, message authentication code (MAC), pseudorandom function (PRF), pseudorandom oracle (PRO), and target collision resistance (TCR). Nonetheless, there is no further study on these two MPP hash domain extension transforms with regard to the other properties. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. Firstly, we show that ROX does not preserve two other widely-used and important security notions, namely MAC and PRO. We also show a positive result about ROX, namely that it also preserves PRF. Secondly, we show that ESh does not preserve other four properties, namely Sec, aSec, Pre, and aPre. On the positive side we show that ESh can preserve ePre property. Our results in this paper provide a full picture of the MPP capabilities of both ROX and ESh transforms by completing the property-preservation analysis of these transforms in regard to all ten security notions of interest, namely CR, Sec, aSec, eSec (TCR), Pre, aPre, ePre, MAC, PRF, PRO.