Book:The Architecture of Cryptographic Hashes

The Architecture of Cryptographic Hashes

Introduction

The Architecture of Cryptographic Hashes: Understanding, Designing, and Building Hash Functions from First Principles is a book by Ayush Anand about the theory, construction, analysis, and development of cryptographic hash functions. The book introduces the fundamental principles behind cryptographic hashing and examines the historical development and internal mechanisms of hash functions, including MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and SHA-3. It discusses concepts such as internal state, compression functions, permutations, diffusion, message processing, and security properties including collision resistance and preimage resistance. The later chapters move from the analysis of established hash functions to the design and specification of RHA (Rudra Hashing Algorithm), an original hash-function family developed by the author as an exploration of the design process and its associated trade-offs.

Background and publication

The Architecture of Cryptographic Hashes: Understanding, Designing, and Building Hash Functions from First Principles is a book by Ayush Anand on the design and construction of cryptographic hash functions. The book presents cryptographic hashing from foundational concepts, beginning with the representation of information in binary form and progressing through topics including compression functions, collision resistance, one-way properties, Boolean operations, modular arithmetic, bitwise operations, diffusion, and the structural design of hash functions.

The book was written as an introductory and technical reference intended to explain the internal structure of cryptographic hash functions rather than treating them solely as black-box algorithms. It combines mathematical explanations with diagrams and step-by-step descriptions of the components used in hash-function construction. The work also discusses historical and contemporary examples of cryptographic hash functions and the design principles used to evaluate their security.

The book was published under the title The Architecture of Cryptographic Hashes, with the subtitle Understanding, Designing, and Building Hash Functions from First Principles.