Paper 2012/041

A NEW DEDICATED CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH FUNCTION

Norziana Jamil, Ramlan Mahmood, Muhammad Reza Z'aba, Nur Izura Udzir, and Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnaen

Abstract

Recent progress in cryptanalysis on cryptographic hash functions has shown that the most of the hash functions based on the design principles of MD4 are susceptible to differential attack. This paper describes a new 256-bit hash function which is based on parallel branches having a stronger compression function. It is designed to have higher security than that of MD family and its variant. The performance of the new hash functions are evaluated and compared with SHA-256 and FORK-256. It is shown that STITCH-256 exhibit the desired cryptographic properties and comparable with SHA-256 and FORK-256 in its compression function.

Note: Some of the designs in the paper are found weak. Therefore the paper is undergoing a major revision.