Questioning the Criteria for Evaluating Non-cryptographic Hash Functions

Abstract

Although cryptographic and non-cryptographic hash functions are everywhere, there seems to be a gap in how they are designed. Lots of criteria exist for cryptographic hashes motivated by various security requirements, but on the non-cryptographic side there is a certain amount of folklore that, despite the long history of hash functions, has not been fully explored. While targeting a uniform distribution makes a lot of sense for real-world datasets, it can be a challenge when confronted by a dataset with particular patterns.