AN EFFICIENT HASH ALGORITHM TO PRESERVE DATA INTEGRITY

Recent advancements in the field of electronic commerce and internet banking have led to the growing need for a secure communication system. Various other areas including military require a highly reliable system so as to make sure that the shared data is confidential and unaltered. A negligence over these factors can lead to a huge and immutable loss. In this paper, a novel and Efficient Hash Algorithm(EHA) is presented which inherits the basic architecture of SHA-160. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by comparing it with the existing techniques which include MD2, MD5, SHA-160, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512. The comparison is done on the basis of NIST statistical test suite for random numbers and avalanche criteria. The results reveal that the suggested technique is more efficient in terms of randomness and throughput, thus, it can be efficiently used in any data sensitive environments.