A secure and efficient cryptographic hash function based on NewFORK-256

Cryptographic hash functions serve as a fundamental building block of information security and are used in numerous security applications and protocols such as digital signature schemes, construction of MAC and random number generation, for ensuring data integrity and data origin authentication. Researchers have noticed serious security flaws and vulnerabilities in most widely used MD and SHA family hash functions. As a result hash functions from FORK family with longer digest value were considered as good alternatives for MD5 and SHA-1, but recent attacks against these hash functions have highlighted their weaknesses. In this paper we propose a dedicated hash function MNF-256 based on the design principle of NewFORK-256. It takes 512 bit message blocks and generates 256 bit hash value. A random sequence is added as an additional input to the compression function of MNF-256. Three branch parallel structure and secure compression function make MNF-256 an efficient, fast and secure hash function. Various simulation results indicate that MNF-256 is immune to common cryptanalytic attacks and faster than NewFORK-256.