Corruption-localizing hashing

Abstract

Collision-intractable hashing is an important cryptographic primitive with numerous applications including efficient integrity checking for transmitted and stored data, and software. In several of these applications, it is important that in addition to detecting corruption of the data we also localize the corruptions. This motivates us to introduce and investigate the new notion of corruption-localizing hashing, defined as a natural extension of collision-intractable hashing. Our main contribution is in formally defining corruption-localizing hash schemes and designing two such schemes, one starting from any collision-intractable hash function, and the other starting from any collision-intractable keyed hash function. Both schemes have attractive efficiency properties in three important metrics: localization factor, tag length and localization running time, capturing the quality of localization, and performance in terms of storage and time complexity, respectively. The closest previous results, when modified to satisfy our formal definitions, only achieve similar properties in the case of a single corruption. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.