Recently, we released a paper on Sakura, a flexible, fairly general, coding for tree hash modes. The coding does not define a tree hash mode, but instead specifies a way to format the message blocks and chaining values into inputs to the underlying function for any topology, including sequential hashing. The main benefit is to avoid input clashes between different tree growing strategies, even before the hashing modes are defined, and to make the SHA-3 standard tree-hashing ready.

It expands on the concept of “universal” (now: flexible) hash tree coding that we presented at NIST on February 6 (see slides 55-59). The goal is to address tree hashing, as discussed by John Kelsey in his SHA3 presentation at the RSA conference last February.

All comments are welcome!