Effectiveness Analysis and Hash Function

Abstract

A hash function is a mechanism that can be used to verify the integrity of the
data. It is mainly used to provide safe access to information and ensure that no tampering
occurs. Authentication has included the hash functions to store and verify the validity of
the password. If the used hash function is very strong, it allows the system to be very safe
even though there is a slight change in the input and the output possesses significant
changes. The aim of this paper was to analyze the security of hash functions by
considering the avalanche effect when a single bit was changed. The experiments were
implemented with Modification Detection Codes (MDC) and Message Authentication Codes
(MAC) categories with upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, symbols and mixes.
The tool used in the experiments was OpenSSL. From the results, it could be concluded
that the categories of MDC and SHA-1 had the most avalanche effect for symbols and
characters and the categories of MAC and SHA-256 had the most avalanche effect for
mixed characters