Variationally universal hashing

Abstract

The strongest well-known measure for the quality of a universal hash-function family H is its being ε-strongly universal, which measures, for randomly chosen h ∈ H, one's inability to guess h (m′) even if h (m) is known for some m ≠ m′. We give example applications in which this measure is too weak, and we introduce a stronger measure for the quality of a hash-function family, ε-variationally universal, which measures one's inability to distinguish h (m′) from a random value even if h (m) is known for some m ≠ m′. We explain the utility of this notion and provide an approach for constructing efficiently computable ε-VU hash-function families. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.