The Parazoa Family: Generalizing the Sponge Hash Functions

Abstract. Sponge functions were introduced by Bertoni et al. as an alternative to the classical MerkleDamg˚ard design. Many hash function submissions to the SHA-3 competition launched by NIST in 2007, such as CubeHash, Fugue, Hamsi, JH, Keccak and Luffa, derive from the original sponge design, and security guarantees from some of these constructions are typically based on indifferentiability results. Although indifferentiability proofs for these designs often bear significant similarities, these have so far been obtained independently for each construction. In this work, we introduce the parazoa family of hash functions as a generalization of “sponge-like” functions. Similarly to the sponge design, the parazoa family consists of compression and extraction phases. The parazoa hash functions, however, extend the sponge construction by enabling the use of a wider class of compression and extraction functions that need to satisfy certain properties. More importantly, we prove that...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Elena Andreeva, Bart Mennink, Bart Preneel
• Keywords: Hash Function, Hash Functions, IACR 2011, Security Guarantees