project hash of life
 
     a cellular approach to cryptographic hash functions
 

 
A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a deterministic procedure,
that takes an arbitrary block of data and returns a fixed-size bit string,
the (cryptographic) hash value, such that an accidental or intentional
change to the data will change the hash value.
 
While studying cellular automatons (CA) in 2002, I stumbled upon the possibility
of deriving a cryptographic hash from certain characteristics of the life cycle
a cellular automaton goes through given an initial state.
 
Implementing a proof of concept, I focused on Conways Game Of Life as
ruleset for the automaton, using the binary representation of the message to
be hashed as initial state.
 

 
Right now, research has to be done to proof that certain requirements of a CA
based hash function are met, including that it is:
 

infeasible to find a message that has a given hash

infeasible to find two different message with the same hash (collission)

infeasible to modify a message without changing its hash