NESHA-256, NEw 256-bit Secure Hash Algorithm (Extended Abstract)

In this paper, we introduce a new dedicated 256-bit hash function: NESHA-256. The recently contest for hash functions held by NIST, motivates us to design the new hash function which has a parallel structure. Advantages of parallel structures and also using some ideas from the designing procedure of block-cipher-based hash functions strengthen our proposed hash function both in security and in efficiency. NESHA-256 is designed not only to have higher security but also to be faster than SHA-256: the performance of NESHA-256 is at least 38% better than that of SHA-256 in software. We give security proofs supporting our design, against existing known cryptographic attacks on hash functions.