Performance and Security Tradeoffs in Cryptographic Hash Functions

Abstract

A cryptographic hash function is an important component used in many applications, such as blockchain, authentication, data integrity, and digital signature. With the rapid increase in usage of mobile devices, more attention goes towards the tradeoffs between performance and security of cryptographic hash functions on mobile devices due to their limited computational power. The researchers in this paper study the most common cryptographic hash functions and highlights the tradeoffs between their performance and security. The hash functions considered in this study are MD4, MD5, Whirlpool, and the hash functions in the SHA family. The security of these hash functions is compared based on recent attacks in terms of collision resistance, preimage attacks, and sensitivity analysis. While the performance is tested on different input block sizes, useful observations and recommendations are made based on the results of this study.