I was reading about hash functions, namely SHA, and I read that it is made of th

Question

I was reading about hash functions, namely SHA, and I read that it is made of the Merkle-Damgard construction. And then the text said that the compression function used is based on the Davis-Meyer compression function. The text also mentioned that SHA-256 is based on the block cipher SHACAL-2.

I got a little bit confused about the building block that constitutes SHA-256. Is SHACAL-2 a block cipher or a compression function or both? And what are the advantages of using SHACAL-2 instead of AES-128?

Explanation / Answer

SHACAL-2 is a block cipher. One way compression functions are typically using block ciphers as a building block, but add some simple operation that make the function one way. In the case of SHA-256, the compression function is SHACAL-2 in Davies-Meyer mode. SHA-256 in turn, consists of this compression function with Merkle-Damg

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