Abstract
Cryptographic hash functions play an essential role in cryptography to provide services in the field of information security, specifically in the areas of data integrity and message authentication. Most cryptographic hash functions have been based on the Merkle-Damgard construction, which converts a message with an arbitrary length into a fixed-length hash digest. The problem with the Merkle-Damgard construction is its computation time, which increases gradually as the input size increases when the processes run sequentially. In this paper, we proposed an alternative construction to reduce the computation time and improve the overall hashing efficiency. The proposed method is the Multi-Pipeline Hash Construction (MPHC), which presents overlapping execution between independent block functions. The MPHC runs in parallel on multi-core machines and enhances the hashing performance in terms of speedup and efficiency. Experimental results indicate that the MPHC performs better than the Merkle-Damgard construction, and the security analysis proves that the MPHC produces better-quality hash digests than the Merkle-Damgard construction in terms of the randomness of the digest value.