CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH FUNCTIONS –A SURVEY

Abstract

The use of cryptography started from late 1970s and became more prominent in 1980s.Commercial use of cryptograghy started in late 1990s.Many organization started using cryptographic tools for information security but many security challenges were faced by the organizations.The cryptographic designs were having more security flaws.The use of cryptography functions started from MD5 and SHA-1.Now we are going to enter into digital era ,therefore it is very important to discuss the role of cryptographic functions in our day to day activities. Cryptographic functions are used for encryption, digital signatures, secure hashing, message (data) authentication codes, key management, entity authentication, password, and random number generation etc. This paper explains the history of the usage ,design,concept, and the applications of hash functions.