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Structural Attacks on Two SHA-3 Candidates: Blender-n and DCH-n

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Information Security (ISC 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 5735))

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Abstract

The recently started SHA-3 competition in order to find a new secure hash standard and thus a replacement for SHA-1/SHA-2 has attracted a lot of interest in the academic world as well as in industry. There are 51 round one candidates building on sometimes very different principles.

In this paper, we show how to attack two of the 51 round one hash functions. The attacks have in common that they exploit structural weaknesses in the design of the hash function and are independent of the underlying compression function. First, we present a preimage attack on the hash function Blender-n. It has a complexity of about n·2n/2 and negligible memory requirements. Secondly, we show practical collision and preimage attacks on DCH-n. To be more precise, we can trivially construct a (28 + 2)-block collision for DCH-n and a 1297-block preimage with only 521 compression function evaluations. The attacks on both hash functions work for all output sizes and render the hash functions broken.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK), Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16a, A-8010, Graz, Austria

    Mario Lamberger & Florian Mendel

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  1. Mario Lamberger
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  2. Florian Mendel
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell’ Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Bramante 65, 26013, Crema, (CR), Italy

    Pierangela Samarati

  2. Computer Science Department, Google Inc. and Columbia University, Room 464, S.W. Mudd Building, 10027, New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

  3. Information Security Group, Pisa Research Area, Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - IIT Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - C.N.R., Via. G. Moruzzi 1, 56125, Pisa, Italy

    Fabio Martinelli

  4. Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Bramante, 65, 26013, Crema, (CR), Italy

    Claudio A. Ardagna

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Lamberger, M., Mendel, F. (2009). Structural Attacks on Two SHA-3 Candidates: Blender-n and DCH-n . In: Samarati, P., Yung, M., Martinelli, F., Ardagna, C.A. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5735. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04474-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04474-8_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04473-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04474-8

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