Merkle–Damgård construction

E99142

The Merkle–Damgård construction is a fundamental method for building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions from fixed-size compression functions, used in many classic hash algorithms like MD5 and SHA-1.


Statements (46)
Predicate Object
instanceOf cryptographic construction
hash function design paradigm
appliesTo arbitrary-length messages
assumes compression function is collision-resistant
basedOn fixed-length compression function
computes chaining value for each message block
contrastWith HAIFA construction
sponge construction
wide-pipe construction
domain information security
theoretical computer science
field cryptographic hash functions
cryptography
finalStep output last chaining value as hash
formalizedIn Damgård 1989 paper
Merkle 1989 paper
goal provable security reduction from hash to compression function
hasPart compression function
initialization vector
iterative chaining process
padding scheme
implies hash function is collision-resistant if compression function is collision-resistant
independentlyProposedBy Ivan Damgård
Ralph Merkle NERFINISHED
influenced design of many classic hash standards
inspired later domain-extension constructions for hash functions
limitation does not inherently provide indifferentiability from a random oracle
Merkle–Damgård strengthening padding that appends message length
namedAfter Ivan Damgård
Ralph Merkle NERFINISHED
output fixed-length hash value
property length extension property
requires collision-resistant padding
publicly known initialization vector
securityModel black-box model of compression function
typicalPadding Merkle–Damgård strengthening
use building collision-resistant hash functions
usedIn HAVAL
MD5
RIPEMD-160
SHA-0
SHA-1
SHA-2
usesInput message blocks of fixed size
vulnerableTo length extension attacks
yearProposed late 1970s

Referenced by (5)
Subject (surface form when different) Predicate
Ralph Merkle ("Merkle–Damgård hash construction")
Ronald L. Rivest ("MD5")
notableWork
Ralph Merkle
hasConceptNamedAfter
Ralph Merkle
knownFor
Merkle–Damgård construction ("Merkle–Damgård strengthening")
typicalPadding

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