A preliminary exploration of striped hashing a probabilistic scheme to speed up existing hash algorithms

Hash algorithms generate a fixed-size output from a variable-size input. Typical algorithms will process every byte of the input to generate their output, which, on a very large input, can be time consuming. The hashes’ potential slowness, coupled with recently reported attacks on the MD5 and SHA-1 hash algorithms, prompted a look at hashing from a different perspective. By generating several “striped” hashes, we may speed up the hash verification by a factor of the chosen stripe size.