Tiger: A Fast New Hash Function

Tiger is a fast new hash function, designed to be very fast on modern computers, and in particular on the state-of-the-art 64-bit computers (like DEC-Alpha), while it is still not slower than other suggested hash functions on 32-bit machines.

On DEC-Alpha, Tiger hashes more than 132Mbits per second (measured on Alpha 7000, Model 660, on one processor). On the same machine, MD5 hashes only about 37Mbps (this is probably not the best optimized md5 code). On 32-bit machines, the code of Tiger is not fully optimized. Still is hashes faster than MD5 on 486s and Pentiums. We conjecture that Tiger hashes faster than MD5 even on 16-bit machines.

We urge people to study the strength of Tiger; we will appreciate attacks, analysis and any other comments. This page will maintain the latest information on the current status of Tiger, an updated copy of the paper, reference implementations, and the S box generation program. You are welcome to look at this page once in a while to get the latest news.

The Paper and the C Code

Paper: HTML, PostScript
Reference Implementation: tar, zip
(This code is suitable for Alpha, and for most 32-bit machines using either the gcc or cc compilers).
if the above implementation does not compile on your compiler, you can try the emulation on 32-bit-only compilers: tar, zip.
Test Results for the Above Programs
The S Boxes Generation: Description, Reference Implementation
Note that in the original reference implementation that we have published in this page there was a typo that used the wrong bit order when it padded the '1' bit at the end of the message. It used the constant 0x80, rather than 0x01 to append this bit. The reference implementation and test results given above are already corrected. We are grateful to John Lull who found this typo.