Twister - A Hash Function Proposal for SHA-3

Twister is a new framework for hash functions. Twister incorporates the ideas of wide pipe-- and sponge functions. The core of this framework is a - very easy to analyze - mini-round providing both extremly fast diffusion as well as collision-freeness for one mini-round. The total security level is claimed to be not below 2^{n/2} for collision attacks and 2^n for 2nd pre-image attacks. Twister instantiations are secure against all known generic attacks. We also propose three instances Twister-n for hash output sizes n=256,384,512. These instantiations are  highly optimized for 64-bit architectures and run very fast in hardware and software, e.g Twister-256 is faster than SHA-256 on 32 and 64-bit platforms. Furthermore, Twister scales very well on low-end plattforms.

Authors:

• Ewan Fleischman
• Christian Forler
• Michael Gorski
  

Source:

• Twister - A Framework for Secure and Fast Hash Functions
  (published at ISPEC 2009, Springer LNCS 5451, 257–273)
• Twister - A Family of Hash Functions
  (NIST submission, accepted to round one)
  
  
• optimized C code of Twister-256
• optimized C code of Twister-384
• optimized C code of Twister-512
• optimized Assembler code of Twister-256
  
• optimized Assembler code of Twister-384
  
• optimized Assembler code of Twister-512

Tools:

• MDS-Finder for generating MDS matrices

Article on Twister:

• Press release Bauhaus-University Weimar
• Experiment Bauhaus: Twister