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Lecture 3.1.2 - Puzzle Friendly Hash

The document discusses the property of puzzle-friendliness for hash functions and its application to search puzzles. A puzzle-friendly hash function makes it infeasible to find an input x that hashes to a given output value y, without significantly more work than a brute force search. Search puzzles using a puzzle-friendly hash require searching a large space to find a solution x such that the hash of the puzzle ID concatenated with x falls within the target set Y.

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Abdul Wajeed
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312 views

Lecture 3.1.2 - Puzzle Friendly Hash

The document discusses the property of puzzle-friendliness for hash functions and its application to search puzzles. A puzzle-friendly hash function makes it infeasible to find an input x that hashes to a given output value y, without significantly more work than a brute force search. Search puzzles using a puzzle-friendly hash require searching a large space to find a solution x such that the hash of the puzzle ID concatenated with x falls within the target set Y.

Uploaded by

Abdul Wajeed
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF

ENGINEERING
COMPUTER SCIENCE ENGINEERING
Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science & Engineering)
Subject Name: Block chain Technology
Subject Code: 20_CST-412

Puzzle friendly hash


Mapped with CO4

Prepared By: DISCOVER . LEARN . EMPOWER


Er. Ankita Sharma 1
• For a hash function to be cryptographically secure, we require that it
has the following three additional properties:
• Collision Resistant
• Hiding
• Puzzle friendliness
Definition
• Puzzle friendliness.​A hash function ​H ​is said to be puzzle‐friendly if
for every possible n‐bit output value ​y​, if k is chosen from a
distribution with high min‐entropy, then it is infeasible to find ​x​such
that H(k ‖ x) = y in time significantly less than ​2​n

• Intuitively, what this means is that if someone wants to target the


hash function to come out to some particular output value ​y​, that if
there’s part of the input that is chosen in a suitably randomized way,
it’s very difficult to find another value that hits exactly that target.
Application: Search puzzle.
• ​A mathematical problem which requires searching a very large space
in order to find the solution. In particular, a search puzzle has no
shortcuts. That is, there’s no way to find a valid solution other than
searching that large space.
• Search puzzle. ​A search puzzle consists of
● a hash function, ​H​,
● a value, ​id ​(which we call the ​puzzle‐ID​), chosen from a
high min‐entropy distribution
● and a target set ​Y

• A solution to this puzzle is a value, ​x​, such that


H(​id​‖ ​x​) ∈ ​Y
• The intuition is this: if H has an n‐bit output, then it can take any of ​2​n​
values. Solving the puzzle requires finding an input so that the output falls
within the set Y, which is typically much smaller than
the set of all outputs.
• The size of Y determines how hard the puzzle is. If Y is the set of all n‐bit
strings the puzzle is trivial, whereas if Y has only 1 element the puzzle is
maximally hard.

• The fact that the puzzle id has high min‐entropy ensures that there are no
shortcuts.
• If a search puzzle is puzzle‐friendly, this implies that there’s no solving
strategy for this puzzle which is much better than just trying random
values of ​x.
• This idea is used in Bitcoin mining, which is a sort of computational
puzzle.

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