An Improved Secured Hash Algorithm(SHA1) Using Padding Index Method

Today, hashing algorithms are employed in many applications for security purposes. Many developments have been made in the family of hashing algorithms, especially the SHA1 algorithm. Because of flaws in the past years, several modifications have been done to mitigate the collision attack but still, the security is always subject to attack. This paper modified the SHA1 algorithm based on its weaknesses in cryptanalysis. We considered the use of the padding index method as our contribution to the algorithm without affecting the original SHA1 Algorithm. To measure the effectiveness of the padding index method we use SHA1 collider and we obtained none of the pdf files had the same hash value. The Avalanche effect has been applied based on different message sets used and exhibited 51% higher than 44.04% of the Original SHA1 Algorithm and passed to the NIST standard for Security. Overall, the padding index approach has been proven effective and provide collision resistance against cryptanalysis and Man-In-The-Middle-Attack based on the results gathered on this study.