LSH: A new fast secure hash function family

Abstract

Since Wang’s attacks on the standard hash functions MD5 and SHA-1, design and analysis of hash functions have been studied a lot. NIST selected Keccak as a new hash function standard SHA-3 in 2012 and announced that Keccak was chosen because its design is different from MD5 and SHA-1/2 so that it could be secure against the attacks to them and Keccak’s hardware efficiency is quite better than other SHA-3 competition candidates. However, software efficiency of Keccak is somewhat worse than present standards and other candidates. Since software efficiency becomes more important due to increase of kinds and volume of communication/storage data as cloud and big data service spread widely, its software efficiency degradation is not desirable. In this paper, we present a new fast hash function family LSH, whose software efficiency is above four times faster than SHA-3, and 1.5–2.3 times faster than other SHA-3 finalists. Moreover it is secure against all critical hash function attacks.