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Finding collisions on a one-way street: Can secure hash functions be based on general assumptions? (English) Zbl 0919.94032

Nyberg, Kaisa (ed.), Advances in Cryptology. International conference on the Theory and application of cryptographic techniques. Espoo, Finland, May 31 - June 4, 1998. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 1403, 334-345 (1998).
Summary: We prove the existence of an oracle relative to which there exist several well-known cryptographic primitives, including one-way permutations, but excluding (for a suitably strong definition) collision-intractible hash functions. Thus any proof that such functions can be derived from these weaker primitives is necessarily non-relativizing; in particular, no provable construction of a collision-intractable hash function can exist based solely on a “black box” one-way permutation. This result can be viewed as a partial justification for the common practice of treating the collision-intractable hash function as a cryptographic primitive, rather than attempting to derive it from a weakly primitive (such as a one-way permutation).
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0889.00042].

MSC:

94A60 Cryptography
68P25 Data encryption (aspects in computer science)