Security Properties of Domain Extenders for Cryptographic Hash Functions

Cryptographic hash functions reduce inputs of arbitrary or very large length to a short string of fixed length. All hash function designs start from a compression function with fixed length inputs. The compression function itself is designed from scratch, or derived from a block cipher or a permutation. The most common procedure to extend the domain of a compression function in order to obtain a hash function is a simple linear iteration; however, some variants use multiple iterations or a tree structure that allows for parallelism. This paper presents a survey of 17 extenders in the literature.