MD6
MD6 is Rivest's SHA-3 competition submission, a parallelizable hash based on Merkle trees using a simple ARX round function.
Purpose
A SHA-3 competition candidate supporting parallelism and variable output length; the structure is a tree-based Merkle-Damgård.
Mechanism
The message is split into blocks; each block is independently compressed by the ARX round function into a chaining value, merged level by level up the Merkle tree to the root. Tree depth and parallelism are configurable. The root outputs the digest.
Use cases
- SHA-3 competition submission
- Parallel Merkle tree hashing
- Variable output