An efficient message digest algorithm (MD) for data security

Presents a new proposed message digest (MD) algorithm. Many of its characteristics (application domain, performance and implementation structure) are similar to those of the MD4 family of hash functions. The proposed algorithm takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128/160-bit fingerprint or message digest. New features of the proposed algorithm include the heavy use of data-dependent rotations and the inclusion of integer multiplication as an additional primitive operation. These proposed features are expected to provide a high security level with enhancement in throughput. The proposed algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be compressed in a secure manner before being signed (encrypted) with a private secret key under a public-key cryptosystem. The proposed algorithm is designed to be quite fast on 32-bit machines. In addition, it does not require any large substitution tables, so that the algorithm can be coded quite compactly. We describe its general characteristics, architecture and implementation, and give a complete specification for MD-160/128. Several test vectors are used to inspect the validity of the proposed algorithm. Also, we compare the software performance of several MD4-based algorithms, which is of independent interest. Simulation results show that the throughput of the proposed MD-128 algorithm is about 76.4 Mbit/s while that of RIPEMD-128 (Race Integrity Primitives Evaluation MD, 128-bit) is about 69.8 Mbit/s.