Brand New Categories of Cryptographic Hash Functions: A Survey

Background and Objectives: Cryptographic hash functions are the linchpins of mobile services, blockchains, and many other technologies. Designing cryptographic hash functions has been approached by research communities from the physics, mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering fields. The emergence of new hash functions, new hash constructions, and new requirements for application-specific hash functions, such as the ones of mobile services, have encouraged us to make a comparison of different hash functions and propose a new classification.Methods: Over 100 papers were surveyed and reviewed in detail. The research conducted in this paper has included four sections; article selection, detailed review of selected articles, data collection, and evaluation of results. Data were collected as new hash function properties, new hash function constructions, new hash function categories, and existing hash function attacks which are used to evaluate the results.Results: This paper surveys seven categories of hash functions including block cipher-based functions, algebraic-based functions, custom-designed functions, Memory-hard Functions (MHFs), Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), quantum hash functions and optical hash functions. To the best of our knowledge, the last four mentioned categories have not been sufficiently addressed in most existing surveys. Furthermore, this paper overviews hash-related adversaries and six hash construction variants. In addition, we employed the mentioned adversaries as evaluation criteria to illustrate how different categories of hash functions withstand the mentioned adversaries. Finally, the surveyed hash function categories were evaluated against mobile service requirements.Conclusion: In addition to new classification, our findings suggest using PUFs with polynomial-time error correction or possibly bitwise equivalents of algebraic structures that belongs to post-quantum cryptography as candidates to assist mobile service interaction requirements.