Counter-bDM: A provably secure family of multi-block-length compression functions

Abstract

Block-cipher-based compression functions serve an important purpose in cryptography since they allow to turn a given block cipher into a one-way hash function. While there are a number of secure double-block-length compression functions, there is little research on generalized constructions. This paper introduces the Counter-bDM family of multi-block-length compression functions, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first provably secure block-cipher-based compression function with freely scalable output size. We present generic collisionand preimage-security proofs for it, and compare our results with those of existing double-block-length constructions. Our security bounds show that our construction is competitive with the best collision- and equal to the best preimage-security bound of existing double-block-length constructions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.