On Information Integrity Measurement with Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA)

Abstract

The “information age” as often referred to the modern society, has become heavily dependent on information systems. As this dependency increases, the threat to information security has also gained ground. Societies need to cater for the security of information, and this has led to the development of different information security techniques most notable of which is cryptography. Cryptographic Hash functions are used to achieve a number of security goals like authenticity, digital signatures, pseudo-random number generation, digital steganography, digital time stamping. The strength of a cryptographic hash function can be summarized into its vulnerability to attack and computational time. This work therefore, reviews existing standard cryptographic hash functions, their construction and their application areas. The secured hash function (SHA) was selected and implemented based on its comparative worth over others. The implemented cryptographic hash function is evaluated for performance using a cryptographic evaluation standard.