A narrow trail in hash function design

With Guido Bertoni, Gilles Van Assche and Michaël Peeters, I form since a few years a team that has as main goal to bring innovation in the field of hash function design. This has lead to a concrete hash function design called RadioGatún, a new reference concept called Sponge function, a collision-generating attack on Panama and some other more general issues related to stream-oriented hashing such as trail backtracking and the belt-and-mill structure.

But actually, I have been active in hash functions since 1990 with attacks, a design approach quite different from the mainstream and a number of concrete proposals. In general the corresponding publications have stayed rather obscure and not all of them have stood the test of time. Still, several ideas, constructions and component functions introduced in it have survived and are present in our recent proposals. In my presentation I will give a chronological overview of this early work concentrating on the aspects that are still relevant today and the lessons learnt from failures such as the complete lack of security of the Panama hash function as shown by the attack of Vincent Rijmen et al.

"ESC Narrow Trail Hash.pdf"

"DAEMEN Joan" is mentioned on: BERTONI Guido | Home | Participants | VAN ASSCHE Gilles