Integrity verification for digital Holy Quran verses using cryptographic hash function and compression

Abstract Data Integrity is one of the primary concepts in information security. The main task of the cryptographic hash function is to assure the integrity of the transmitted data. In this work, integrity verification methods for digital verses of the Holy Quran are proposed. The first method uses cryptographic hash functions and generate the hash table of the Holy Quran. SHA256 and RIPEMD160 hash functions are chosen in this work. The second method is a single compression technique which manipulates data during the run time. The compression method makes use of the two bytes in Unicode UTF-8 for the Arabic characters set. The results show that for a digital copy of the Holy Quran encoded in Unicode UTF-8, the sizes of the hash tables generated by SHA256 and RIPEMD160 are 84.73% and 90.46% (6.55-fold and 10.48-fold) smaller respectively. The compressed version of the Holy Quran has a size of 47.24% (1.9-fold) smaller than the original copy. In addition, a second preimage attack on a hash table for the digital Holy Quran produced by using CRC32 hash function is conducted to study the impact of such attacks on the two hash tables proposed in this work.