Amplifying Collision Resistance: A Complexity-Theoretic Treatment

We initiate a complexity-theoretic treatment of hardness amplification for collision-resistant hash functions, namely the transformation of weakly collision-resistant hash functions into strongly collision-resistant ones in the standard model of computation. We measure the level of collision resistance by the maximum probability, over the choice of the key, for which an efficient adversary can find a collision. The goal is to obtain constructions with short output, short keys, small loss in adversarial complexity tolerated, and a good trade-off between compression ratio and computational complexity. We provide an analysis of several simple constructions, and show that many of the parameters achieved by our constructions are almost optimal in some sense. Keywords. collision resistance, hash functions, hardness amplification, combiners

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CRYPTO
• Authors: Ran Canetti, Ronald L. Rivest, Madhu Sudan, Luca Trevisan, Salil P. Vadhan, Hoeteck Wee
• Keywords: Collision Resistance, Collision-resistant Hash Functions, CRYPTO 2007, Hash Functions