Charanjit Jutla

Charanjit Jutla (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)

UB CSE Theory Seminar, Fall 2009

Tuesday, Oct 27
3:30pm
Bell 242

Cryptographic Hash Functions

The ongoing NIST Hash Function Competition to select the next cryptographic hash standard SHA-3 has resulted in various new designs. Although the ultimate goal of such hash functions to be a Random Oracle is untenable, there are various limited and practically useful properties that a hash function can strive for and actually obtain. However, even for such properties like Collision Resistance or Pseudo-randomness, various designs trade-off speed and provable security.

In this talk, we will consider various such trade-offs, especially with regards to critically important properties one may desire of cryptographic hash functions. We will focus on IBM's submission to the competition, called "Fugue", and show how it attains provable resistance to differential attacks for finding collisions, while still being competitively fast.