ANALYSIS OF SHA 3 FINAL ROUND CANDIDATE ALGORITHMS AND DESIGN OF VARIANT TO SKEIN HASH FAMILY

Abstract

Technological advancements and globalization have made faster exchange of newlineinformation a very vital aspect of human life and society. The exponential growth of newlinenetworks, internet, and portable devices have contributed to proliferation of information. newlineWith all this, securing information has become equally important and challenging.1 newlineCryptography in general and Cryptographic Hash Functions in particular are extensively newlineused to accomplish security of information. Cryptographic Hash Functions are crucial in newlineimplementing multiple security goals and have led their way into various security newlineapplications like: digital signatures, storing passwords, digital time stamping, newlineconstructing block ciphers, generating pseudorandom numbers, maintaining secure web newlineconnections, encryption key management, virus scanning, indexing data in hash tables, newlineand detecting accidental data corruption as checksums etc.2 newlineAmong all hash functions being used, those from SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) newlinefamily covering SHA-0, SHA-1, SHA-2 (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512) newlinehave been the most commonly used ones. This SHA family of functions was developed newlineby National Security Agency (NSA) and certified as Federal Information Processing newlineStandard (FIPS) by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), US newlineDepartment of Commerce. All these are based on MD4 and MD5 algorithms, commonly newlineknown as MDx family of hash functions newline