Chaotic neural networks and farfalle construction based parallel keyed secure hash function

Abstract

AbstractParallel computing of hash functions along with the security requirements have great advantage in order to reduce the time consumption and overhead of the CPU. In this article, a keyed hash function based on farfalle construction and chaotic neural networks (CNNs) is proposed, which generates a hash value with arbitrary (defined by user) length (eg, 256 and 512 bits). The proposed hash function has parallelism merit because it is built over farfalle construction which avoids the dependency between the blocks of a given message. Moreover, the proposed hash function is chaos based (ie, it relies on chaotic maps and CNNs which have non‐periodic behavior). The security analysis shows that the proposed hash function is robust and satisfies the properties of hash algorithms, such as random‐like (non‐periodic) behavior, ideal sensitivity to original message and secret key, one‐way property and optimal diffusion effect. The speed performance of the hash function is also analyzed and compared with a hash function which was built based on sponge construction and CNN, and compared with secure hash algorithm (SHA) variants like SHA‐2 and SHA‐3. The results have shown that the proposed hash function has lower time complexity and higher throughput especially with large size messages. Additionally, the proposed hash function has enough resistance to multiple attacks, such as collision attack, birthday attack, exhaustive key search attack, preimage and second preimage attacks, and meet‐in‐the‐middle attack. These advantages make it ideal to be used as a good collision‐resistant hash function.