Paper 2005/390

3C- A Provably Secure Pseudorandom Function and Message Authentication Code.A New mode of operation for Cryptographic Hash Function

Praveen Gauravaram, William Millan, Juanma Gonzalez Nieto, and Edward Dawson

Abstract

We propose a new cryptographic construction called 3C, which works as a pseudorandom function (PRF), message authentication code (MAC) and cryptographic hash function. The 3C-construction is obtained by modifying the Merkle-Damgard iterated construction used to construct iterated hash functions. We assume that the compression functions of Merkle-Damgard iterated construction realize a family of fixed-length-input pseudorandom functions (FI-PRFs). A concrete security analysis for the family of 3C- variable-length-input pseudorandom functions (VI-PRFs) is provided in a precise and quantitative manner. The 3C- VI-PRF is then used to realize the 3C- MAC construction called one-key NMAC (O-NMAC). O-NMAC is a more efficient variant of NMAC and HMAC in the applications where key changes frequently and the key cannot be cached. The 3C-construction works as a new mode of hash function operation for the hash functions based on Merkle-Damgard construction such as MD5 and SHA-1. The generic 3C- hash function is more resistant against the recent differential multi-block collision attacks than the Merkle-Damgard hash functions and the extension attacks do not work on the 3C- hash function. The 3C-X hash function is the simplest and efficient variant of the generic 3C hash function and it is the simplest modification to the Merkle-Damgard hash function that one can achieve. We provide the security analysis for the functions 3C and 3C-X against multi-block collision attacks and generic attacks on hash functions. We combine the wide-pipe hash function with the 3C hash function for even better security against some generic attacks and differential attacks. The 3C-construction has all these features at the expense of one extra iteration of the compression function over the Merkle-Damgard construction.

Note: This is a draft version of the work in progress. For any comments, suggestions and corrections please contact the author and your help is very much appreciated and acknowledged in the final draft.