Analysis of Dedicated Cryptographic Hash Functions–MD5 and SHA-1

Abstract

Cryptography is the art and science of information security and Cryptographic hash functions are one of the most important tools used in modern cryptography. A hash function is a transformation function that maps strings of arbitrary length to strings of fixed length. For the last two decades, many types of hash functions have been defined but, the most widely used in many of the cryptographic applications currently are hash functions based on block ciphers and the dedicated hash functions. This dissertation shows how dedicated hash functions are constructed and what are their design principles and where they can be used. This dissertation also looks into a comparison between two dedicated hash algorithms. It has been observed that the MD5 algorithm is slightly cheaper to compute than SHA-1.