Paper 2020/991

A Novel Hash Function Design based on Hybrid Cellular Automata and Sponge Functions

Anita John, Alan Reji, Ajay P Manoj, Atul Premachandran, Basil Zachariah, and Jimmy Jose

Abstract

Hash functions serve as the fingerprint of a message. They also serve as an authentication mechanism in many applications. Nowadays, hash functions are widely used in blockchain technology and bitcoins. Today, most of the work concentrates on the design of lightweight hash functions which needs minimal hardware and software resources. This paper proposes a lightweight hash function which makes use of Cellular Automata (CA) and sponge functions. This hash function accepts arbitrary length message and produces fixed size hash digest. An additional property of this function is that the size of the hash digest may be adjusted based on the application because of the inherent property of varying length output of sponge function. The proposed hash function can be efficiently used in resource constraint environments in a secure and efficient manner. In addition, the function is resistant to all known generic attacks against hash functions and is also preimage resistant, second preimage resistant and collision resistant.