Design of dynamic digest through polynomial product for improved avalanche effect on keyless hash function

Abstract

The integrity violation of remote data draws more significance after the advent of cloud solutions. The conventional digest functions like MD4, MD5, SHA-160, SHA-2 family, and SHA-3 family provide a more elegant solution for the aforesaid problem. But the breaking of MD4, MD5, and SHA-160 algorithms and the partisal breaking of the families of SHA-2 and SHA-3 raises concerns about their use on cryptographic applications. In addition, they do not provide the facility to decide the hash output length dynamically at runtime. This work attempts to address the aforesaid problems through polynomial products. The proposed design uses a higher-order two-variables polynomial function to establish the hash output. The application of polynomial function at the block-level helps the proposed design to produce variable length hash output. The experimental analysis of avalanche response, the effect of an avalanche on the hash output nibbles, and the analysis of confusion and diffusion prove the proposed design performs exceedingly well than the conventional algorithms. Therefore, the proposed design could be considered as a more suitable alternative for the conventional keyless digest function in the perspective of security.