Hash functions and information theoretic security

Information theoretic security is an important security notion in cryptography as it provides a true lower bound for attack complexities. However, in practice attacks often have a higher cost than the information theoretic bound. In this paper we study the relationship between information theoretic attack costs and real costs.

We show that in the information theoretic model, many well-known and commonly used hash functions such as MD5 and SHA-256 fail to be preimage resistant.