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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:03 ADT
Matt Blaze (mab@crypto.com)
Tue, 17 Mar 1998 19:03:25 -0500
>CodherPlunks,
>
> My thesis work is bringing me to look much more closely at
>cryptographic hash functions and various techniques of stitching them
>together. I'm looking for references that address these specific
>questions:
>
> * What's the best accessible reference that discusses the security
>properties required of a good hash (i.e. collision resistance, first and
>second preimage, maybe more exotic stuff regarding distance metrics)? I
>seem to recall reading a paper that had this stuff as part of the HMAC
>discussion a couple of years ago, but haven't been able to find it by
>Web searching.
>
Unfortunately, "hash functions" as used in practice do not seem to have
formally well-defined requirements. For example, "collision-intractable"
is a poorly defined notion for functions with a fixed number of
output bits (it's easy to find collisions, once someone has done the
work of finding a bunch of them...)
A good discussion of this is in Birgit Pfitzmann's thesis, which was
published as a Springer LNCS volume in the last year or two.
-matt
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:03 ADT