Cryptographic Hash Functions (Course)

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Stefan Lucks

Cryptographic hash functions are often considered the "workhorses", the "swiss army knife" and the "duct tape" for the design of complex cryptographic systems and protocols.

This lecture introduces some general design approaches for cryptographic hash functions, such as the Merkle-Damgaard design and the Sponge approach, and general attack technques, suich as cycle finding and distinguished points. This lecture continues by introducing some specific hash functions, such as MD4, MD5, SHA-1, Skein and Keccak, and presents attacks on some of them. Finally, this lecture presents applications of cryptographic hash functions, such as password hashing and blockchains.

Class Meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 - 12:30 a.m. (Karl-Haußknecht-Straße 7 (HK 7), Lecture Room)

First Meeting: April 03 2019

Slides

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Iterated Cryptographic Hash Functions
• Chapter 3: Generic Attacks
• Chapter 4: Block-Cipher-Based Compression Functions
• Chapter 5: Dedicated Compression Functions
• Chapter 6: Hash Trees and Hash-Based Signatures
• Chapter 7: Password-Hashing

Grading:

Oral examination (Admission due to a successful take out of the problem session)

Target audience:

Computer Science and Media, M.Sc.

Material:

• Articles Full-Domain Hash and Simulator Approach, Random Oracle Model (do not distribute),
• Bellare, Rogaway: Random Oracles are Practical: A Paradigm for Designing Efficient Protocols. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 1993:62-73.