MASH-1

MASH-1 (Modular Arithmetic Secure Hash) is a hash function based on modular arithmetic.

History

Despite many proposals, few hash functions based on modular arithmetic have withstood attack, and most that have tend to be relatively inefficient. MASH-1 evolved from a long line of related proposals successively broken and repaired.

Standard

Committee Draft ISO/IEC 10118-4 (Nov 95)

Description

MASH-1 involves use of an RSA-like modulus M, whose bitlength affects the security. M should be difficult to factor, and for M of unknown factorization, the security is based in part on the difficulty of extracting modular roots. M also determines the block size for processing messages.

MASH-2

There is a new version of the algorithm called MASH-2 with a different exponent. The original $e=2$ is replaced by $e=2^8+1$.

References

• A. Menezes, P. van Oorschot, S. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, ISBN 0-8493-8523-7