On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 09:45:20AM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote: > > That's the whole point - a hash function used on an arbitrary message > produces one of its possible outputs. Feed that hash back in and it > produces one of a subset of its possible outputs. Each time you do this, > you lose a little entropy (I can't remember how much, but I do remember > David Wagner explaining it to me when I discovered this for myself quite > a few years ago).
A recent result relevant to this is "Practical consequences of the aberration of narrow-pipe hash designs from ideal random functions", Klima and Gligoroski (http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/384) Which shows that narrow-pipe designs have a huge null space for messages which are exactly as big as the compression function input size. For instance hashing inputs that are multiples of 512 bits, SHA-256 will only produce about 63% of the possible 2^256 outputs. This could be quite relevant to a Merkle scheme since typically the input will be a set of hash outputs; if the internal block size and the output length are not coprime, one would easily encounter this limitation. It could probably be hacked around by using padding on the inputs (eg the input to each Merkle hash is N subtree hashes plus as many zero bytes as required to make the input length a prime number of bytes), but that definitely sets of some bogosity alarms in my mind. One point I am uncertain on is if wide-pipe hashes like Blue Midnight Wish or SHA-384 suffer the same levels of entropy loss as narrow-pipe designs (outside of the case described in the referenced paper, which is specific to narrow pipes). -Jack --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com