Higher Order Universal One-Way Hash Functions

Universal One-Way Hash Functions (UOWHFs) are families of cryptographic hash functions for which first a target input is chosen and subsequently a key which selects a member from the family. Their main security property is that it should be hard to find a second input that collides with the target input. This paper generalizes the concept of UOWHFs to UOWHFs of order r. We demonstrate that it is possible to build UOWHFs with much shorter keys than existing constructions from fixed-size UOWHFs of order r. UOWHFs of order r can be used both in the linear (r + 1)-round Merkle-Damg̊ard construction and in a tree construction.