FrogBard-512: Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Four-Voice Permutation-Based Hash Function

Abstract

FrogBard-512 is an experimental 512-bit hash function based on a custom 2048-bit permutation organized as four 512-bit voices. The sequential mode uses a 1024-bit rate, a 1024-bit capacity, 128-byte message blocks, and a 16-round permutation. Each round combines public round constants, four AES-derived affine-equivalent byte substitutions, ARX quarter-rounds, a parity-dependent cross-voice mixing layer, and fixed lane permutations. The design also includes a separately domain-separated tree mode with 1 MiB leaves, multithreaded processing, and an AVX2 backend for four independent equal-length messages. This paper gives a self-contained description of the construction, constant generation, padding, finalization, tree encoding, implementation profiles, and conformance vectors. It also reports an experimental evaluation covering fixed-vector tests, streaming equivalence, permutation inversion, scalar and SIMD agreement, sanitizer runs, Valgrind-based memory and race analysis, randomized API testing, libFuzzer, AFL++, reduced-round diffusion measurements, and large-stream statistical testing with PractRand and Dieharder. The reported results provide evidence of implementation consistency and the absence of obvious statistical defects in the tested configurations. They do not establish collision resistance, preimage resistance, indifferentiability, or structural security. FrogBard-512 remains a research prototype and has not undergone independent cryptanalysis.