The Pure Crypto Project's Hash Function

[Ralf Senderek]

On Sat, 3 May 2003, Adam Shostack wrote:

> Seems pretty clear:  No, PCH is not secure, until you offer an
> argument in its favor.  In the meantime, the list's assessment is that
> we have not seen a good argument in favor of the new thing you
> propose, and are happy with the tools we have, except we'd like them
> to be faster.

Please assume for a second PCH would be secure, then because of the
fact that for the same reason there is no symmetric cipher in PCP
we will get a secure public cryptosystem entirely dependend on
RSA, Euler, Multiplication and Addition which many of us can fully
understand and which is slower than what we have and what most of us
cannot fully understand because of complexity reasons. But it is not
that slow that we cannot use it and it will be in the public domain.

Exactly because there will be only 100 lines of securtity relevant code
and everything is done with pretty old-fashioned crypto some fresh
thinking is required to solve the complexity problem. And PCP is one
alternative only which (afaik) didn't exist yet.

Naybe some of the list's members value the idea of undeerstandable
crypto, it was the only motivation for me to start working on PCP
over a year ago. And then the question remains: Is PCH secure?

Ralf.

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