Discrete Logarithm Variants of VSH

Recent attacks on standardised hash functions such as SHA1 have reawakened interest in design strategies based on techniques common in provable security. In presenting the VSH hash function, a design based on RSA-like modular exponentiation, the authors introduce VSH-DL, a design based on exponentiation in DLP-based groups. In this article we explore a variant of VSH-DL that is based on cyclotomic subgroups of finite fields; we show that one can tradeoff performance against bandwidth by using known techniques in such groups. Further, we investigate a variant of VSH-DL based on elliptic curves and extract a tighter reduction to the underlying DLP in comparison to the original VSH-DL proposal.