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Random oracle

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A random oracle is perfect cryptographic hash function, although not used in practice it is often used to build a random oracle model in theoretical papers on cryptography to prove the security of a cryptographic system.

When a random oracle is given a query x it does the following,

  • If the oracle has been given the query x before it responds with the same value it gave the last time.
  • If the oracle hasn't been given the query x before it generates a random response which has uniform probability of being chosen from anywhere in the oracle's output domain.

See also: Topics in cryptography.