CRUSH: A New Cryptographic Hash Function using Iterated Halving Technique

Most of the currently accepted designs for cryptographic hash functions are in the style of a block cipher in feed-forward mode. With increasing interest in all forms of cryptanalysis, this limited choice might become a single point of failure in computer security, and so we seek alternative paradigms. In this paper an entirely new approach, based on iterated halving (IH), is proposed for the design of secure and efficient hash functions. This class of algorithms may be instantiated with any reduced round block cipher, allowing a subtle security/performance tradeoff and a direct performance comparison with the existing approach. We present details of a new hash function, “CRUSH”, from the IH class.