How to Build a Hash Function from any Collision-Resistant Function

Thomas Ristenpart; Thomas Shrimpton

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Paper 2008/189

How to Build a Hash Function from any Collision-Resistant Function

Thomas Ristenpart and Thomas Shrimpton

Abstract

Recent collision-finding attacks against hash functions such as MD5 and SHA-1 motivate the use of provably collision-resistant (CR) functions in their place. Finding a collision in a provably CR function implies the ability to solve some hard problem (e.g., factoring). Unfortunately, existing provably CR functions make poor replacements for hash functions as they fail to deliver behaviors demanded by practical use. In particular, they are easily distinguished from a random oracle. We initiate an investigation into building hhash functions from provably CR functions. As a method for achieving this, we present the Mix-Compress-Mix (MCM) construction; it envelopes any provably CR function H (with suitable regularity properties) between two injective ``mixing'' stages. The MCM construction simultaneously enjoys (1) provable collision-resistance in the standard model, and (2) indifferentiability from a monolithic random oracle when the mixing stages themselves are indifferentiable from a random oracle that observes injectivity. We instantiate our new design approach by specifying a blockcipher-based construction that appropriately realizes the mixing stages.

Note: New version fixes a bug in proof of Theorem 6.1.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. A preliminary version appeared at Asiacrypt 2007.
Keywords: Hash functions random oracle collision-resistance pseudorandom oracles indifferentiability
Contact author(s): tristenp @ cs ucsd edu
History: 2010-06-14: revised; 2008-04-29: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2008/189
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/189,
      author = {Thomas Ristenpart and Thomas Shrimpton},
      title = {How to Build a Hash Function from any Collision-Resistant Function},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2008/189},
      year = {2008},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/189}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/189}
}