We study the class of masking based domain extenders for UOWHFs. Our first contribution is to show that any correct masking based domain extender for UOWHF which invokes the compression UOWHF s times must use at least ⌈log 2 s⌉ masks. As a consequence, we obtain the key expansion optimality of several known algorithms among the class of all masking based domain extending algorithms. Our second contribution is to present a new parallel domain extender for UOWHF. The new algorithm achieves asymptotically optimal speed-up over the sequential algorithm and the key expansion is almost everywhere optimal, i.e., it is optimal for almost all possible number of invocations of the compression UOWHF. Our algorithm compares favourably with all previously known masking based domain extending algorithms.

In this paper we will provide a non-trivial sufficient condition for UOWHF-preserving domain extension which will be very easy to verify. Using this result we can prove very easily that all known domain extension algorithms are valid. This will be a nice technique to prove a domain extension is valid. We also propose an optimal (w.r.t. both time complexity and key size) domain extension algorithm based on an incomplete binary tree. In Asiacrypt'03 [6] (also in [5]) author proposed a binary tree based domain extension of UOWHF. We will show that the binary tree based construction [5] is optimal in a subclass of full binary tree based domain extension. A full binary tree based...