Why you should never use hash functions for message authentication

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:54:00 +0100

The general thrust of this post is: use a MAC function like HMAC to sign data, don’t use hash functions. Although not all hash functions suffer from the problem I’m going to illustrate, in general using a hash function for message authentication comes with a lot of potential problems because those functions aren’t designed for this task. You shouldn’t try to work around it by creatively processing the inputs or inventing some fancy way of chaining hash functions. Just use the functions that were designed for this task instead of inventing your own crypto schemes.

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Why you should never use hash functions for message authentication