Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Cryptographic Hashing: basics, blockciphers and beyond

Abstract

We will take a closer look at one of cryptography's least flashy, yet most widely used objects, the hash function. The cryptographic community has been shocked over the last three years by a series of attacks on MD5 (broken), SHA-0 (broken), SHA-1 (teetering) and others. In response, NIST is preparing to call for an international competition to design the next generation of hashing algorithms. Now seems like a good time to revisit exactly what are these objects, what they are supposed to do for us, and how we go about constructing them. We will do this, giving special attention to blockcipher-based hash functions, their security models and performance.

Biography

Tom Shrimpton is an assistant professor of computer science at Portland State University. His work is concerned with provable cryptography, and he has published on various topics such as symmetric and public-key encryption, authenticated-encryption, key distribution, and cryptographic hashing. He has also published papers on statistical signal processing and information theory. Dr. Shrimpton received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California, Davis; his MS from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and his BS from Virginia Tech. He has also worked for the National Security Agency and the Walt Disney company, but not at the same time.