A novel combined cryptographic and hash algorithm based on chaotic control character is proposed in this paper. The control character is generated by chaotic iteration. The plaintext is pre-processed in terms of control character, and then encrypted by the look-up index table. At the same time, the chaotic trajectory is changed continuously according to the control character, which can avoid the dynamical degradation of chaos. Besides, the look-up index table is updated by utilizing the control character continuously, and the index item of the final look-up index table can be considered as the hash value of the whole paragraph of plaintext. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can perform both encryption/decryption and hash in a combined manner. Compared with Wong's and our former algorithms, the proposed one has decreased the ratio of ciphertext/plaintext to 1, and improved the efficiency greatly. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation verify the validity of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.