Esha-256: An Enhanced Secure Cryptographic Hash Algorithm for Information Security

Due to the exponential growth of digital data the need for security and authenticity plays an important role in various applications. Hence an effective method is required to protect the data, one such method is Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256). The SHA-256 is a strong and secure algorithm providing authenticity and digital signature. Though SHA-256 has security, reliability and strong collision resistance features, it is vulnerable to Algebraic Fault Analysis (AFA) and Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks. It also requires longer processing time for hash generation. In order to overcome the above mentioned drawbacks, this study proposes a method called Enhanced Secure Hash Algorithm (ESHA-256) with less computation time and more security. The proposed ESHA-256 has 32 rounds and modified compression function for hash generation. In this method, initially the 64 word vectors are reduced into 32 by applying XOR with adjacent word vectors and the resulting 32 word vectors are given as an input to all the rounds. The compression function is modified by incorporating the first 32-bit fractional segment of cube root of initial 64 primes as two parts. The experimental results of proposed ESHA-256 produces the hash with minimum time which is 53% less when compared existing SHA-256 and also highly resistance to AFA and DFA attacks.