State of the Art in Applied Cryptography

This paper describes the state of the art for cryptographic primitives that are used for protecting the authenticity of information: cryptographic hash functions and digital signature schemes; the first class can be divided into Manipulation Detection Codes (MDCs, also known as one-way and collision resistant hash functions) and Message Authentication Codes (or MACs). The theoretical background is sketched, but most attention is paid to overview the large number of practical constructions for hash functions and to the recent developments in their cryptanalysis. It is also explained to what extent the security of these primitives can be reduced in a provable way to realistic assumptions.