HF-hash : Hash Functions Using Restricted HFE Challenge-1

Vulnerability of dedicated hash functions to various attacks has made the task of designing hash function much more challenging. This provides us a strong motivation to design a new cryptographic hash function viz. HF-hash. This is a hash function, whose compression function is designed by using first 32 polynomials of HFE Challenge-1 [8] with 64 variables by forcing remaining 16 variables as zero. HF-hash gives 256 bits message digest and is as efficient as SHA-256. It is secure against the differential attack proposed by Chabaud and Joux in [6] as well as by Wang et. al. in [25] applied to SHA-0 and SHA-1. We have also compared the efficiency of our HF-hash with SHA-256.