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I'm not active in the field right now, so I can't give specifics (the comment was more borne out of frustration with people putting in so much effort 'reinventing the wheel' in an academic sense).

But if I was you, I'd start with Knuth (he, as another commenter mentioned, covers hashes in great detail), head to the references, and then use Google Scholar to find well-cited recent articles that reference the important papers mentioned there.

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Unfortunately though, a lot of the papers that turn up in Google Scholar are behind paywalls. It is very expensive to get hold of academic papers if you don't work/study somewhere with an institutional licence (anything from $10 upwards per paper).

Yup, that's the world of academic publishing unfortunately. A tip: often you can get a 'preprint' copy of the paper from one of the authors' websites. Probably not strictly legal, but it does happen a lot.

Thanks very much! Might be finally time to cough up the dough for TAOCP then and take it from there.

Money well spent, I'm sure!

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