Comparison of hash function algorithms against attacks: a review

Hash functions are considered key components of nearly all cryptographic protocols, as well as of many security applications such as message authentication codes, data integrity, password storage, and random number generation. Many hash function algorithms have been proposed in order to ensure authentication and integrity of the data, including MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3 and RIPEMD. This paper involves an overview of these standard algorithms, and also provides a focus on their limitations against common attacks. These study shows that these standard hash function algorithms suffer collision attacks and time inefficiency. Other types of hash functions are also highlighted in comparison with the standard hash function algorithm in performing the resistance against common attacks. It shows that these algorithms are still weak to resist against collision attacks

2-Dimension Sums: Distinguishers Beyond Three Rounds of RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160

This paper presents differential-based distinguishers against ISO standard hash functions RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160. The compression functions of RIPEMD-128/-160 adopt the double-branch structure, which updates a chaining variable by computing two functions and merging their outputs. Due to the double size of the internal state and difficulties of controlling two functions simultaneously, only few results were published before. In this paper, second-order differential paths are constructed on reduced RIPEMD-128 and -160. This leads to a practical 4-sum attack on 47 steps (out of 64 steps) of RIPEMD-128 and 40 steps (out of 80 steps) of RIPEMD-160. We then extend the distinguished property from the 4-sum to other properties, which we call \emph{a 2-dimension sum} and \emph{a partial 2-dimension sum}. As a result, the practical partial 2-dimension sum is generated on 48 steps of RIPEMD-128 and 42 steps of RIPEMD-160, with a complexity of $2^{35}$ and $2^{36}$, respectively. Theoretically, $2$-dimension sums are generated faster than the exhaustive search up to 52 steps of RIPEMD-128 and 51 steps of RIPEMD-160, with a complexity of $2^{101}$ and $2^{158}$, respectively. The practical attacks are implemented, and examples of generated (partial) 2-dimension sums are presented

Enhancing the Security Level of SHA-1 by Replacing the MD Paradigm

Cryptographic hash functions are important cryptographic techniques and are used widely in many cryptographic applications and protocols. All the MD4 design based hash functions such as MD5, SHA-0, SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160 are built on Merkle-Damgard iterative method. Recent differential and generic attacks against these popular hash functions have shown weaknesses of both specific hash functions and their underlying Merkle-Damgard construction. In this paper we propose a hash function which follows design principle of SHA-1 and is based on dither construction. Its compression function takes three inputs and generates a single output of 160-bit length. An extra input to a compression function is generated through a fast pseudo-random function. Dither construction shows strong resistance against major generic and other cryptanalytic attacks. The security of proposed hash function against generic attacks, differential attack, birthday attack and statistical attack was analyzed in detail. It is exhaustedly compared with SHA-1 because hash functions from SHA-2 and SHA-3 are of higher bit length and known to be more secure than SHA-1. It is shown that the proposed hash function has high sensitivity to an input message and is secure against different cryptanalytic attacks

New Records in Collision Attacks on SHA-2

The SHA-2 family including SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224 and SHA512/256 is a U.S. federal standard pub- lished by NIST. Especially, there is no doubt that SHA-256 is one of the most important hash functions used in real-world applications. Due to its complex design compared with SHA-1, there is almost no progress in collision attacks on SHA-2 after ASIACRYPT 2015. In this work, we retake this challenge and aim to significantly improve collision attacks on the SHA-2 family. First, we observe from many existing attacks on SHA-2 that the current advanced tool to search for SHA-2 characteristics has reached the bottleneck. Specifically, longer differential characteristics could not be found, and this causes that the collision attack could not reach more steps. To address this issue, we adopt Liu et al.’s MILP-based method and implement it with SAT/SMT for SHA-2, where we also add more techniques to detect contradictions in SHA-2 characteristics. This answers an open problem left in Liu et al.’s paper to apply the technique to SHA-2. With this SAT/SMT-based tool, we search for SHA-2 charac- teristics by controlling its sparsity in a dedicated way. As a result, we successfully find the first practical semi-free-start (SFS) colliding message pair for 39-step SHA-256, improving the best 38-step SFS collision attack published at EUROCRYPT 2013. In addition, we also report the first practical free-start (FS) collision attack on 40-step SHA-224, while the previously best theoretic 40-step attack has time complexity 2110. More- over, for the first time, we can mount practical and theoretic collision attacks on 28-step and 31-step SHA-512, respectively, which improve the best collision attack only reaching 27 steps of SHA-512 at ASIACRYPT 2015. In a word, with new techniques to find SHA-2 characteristics, we have made some notable progress in the analysis of SHA-2 after the major achievements made at EUROCRYPT 2013 and ASIACRYPT 2015

The Sum Can Be Weaker Than Each Part

International audienceIn this paper we study the security of summing the outputs of two independent hash functions, in an effort to increase the security of the resulting design, or to hedge against the failure of one of the hash functions. The exclusive-or (XOR) combiner H1(M)⊕H2(M) is one of the two most classical combiners, together with the concatenation combiner H1(M) H2(M). While the security of the concatenation of two hash functions is well understood since Joux's seminal work on multicollisions, the security of the sum of two hash functions has been much less studied. The XOR combiner is well known as a good PRF and MAC combiner, and is used in practice in TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1. In a hash function setting, Hoch and Shamir have shown that if the compression functions are modeled as random oracles, or even weak random oracles (i.e. they can easily be inverted – in particular H1 and H2 offer no security), H1 ⊕ H2 is indifferentiable from a random oracle up to the birthday bound. In this work, we focus on the preimage resistance of the sum of two narrow-pipe n-bit hash functions, following the Merkle-Damgård or HAIFA structure (the internal state size and the output size are both n bits). We show a rather surprising result: the sum of two such hash functions, e.g. SHA-512 ⊕ Whirlpool, can never provide n-bit security for preimage resistance. More precisely, we present a generic preimage attack with a complexity of O(2 5n/6). While it is already known that the XOR combiner is not preserving for preimage resistance (i.e. there might be some instantiations where the hash functions are secure but the sum is not), our result is much stronger: for any narrow-pipe functions, the sum is not preimage resistant. Besides, we also provide concrete preimage attacks on the XOR combiner (and the concatenation combiner) when one or both of the compression functions are weak; this complements Hoch and Shamir's proof by showing its tightness for preimage resistance. Of independent interests, one of our main technical contributions is a novel structure to control simultaneously the behavior of independent hash computations which share the same input message. We hope that breaking the pairwise relationship between their internal states will have applications in related settings

(Pseudo) Preimage Attack on Round-Reduced Grøstl Hash Function and Others (Extended Version)

The Grøstl hash function is one of the 5 final round candidates of the SHA-3 competition hosted by NIST. In this paper, we study the preimage resistance of the Grøstl hash function. We propose pseudo preimage attacks on Grøstl hash function for both 256-bit and 512-bit versions, i.e. we need to choose the initial value in order to invert the hash function. Pseudo preimage attack on 5(out of 10)-round Grøstl-256 has a complexity of $(2^{244.85},2^{230.13})$ (in time and memory) and pseudo preimage attack on 8(out of 14)-round Grøstl-512 has a complexity of $(2^{507.32},2^{507.00})$. To the best of our knowledge, our attacks are the first (pseudo) preimage attacks on round-reduced Grøstl hash function, including its compression function and output transformation. These results are obtained by a variant of meet-in-the-middle preimage attack framework by Aoki and Sasaki. We also improve the time complexities of the preimage attacks against 5-round Whirlpool and 7-round AES hashes by Sasaki in FSE~2011

New Records in Collision Attacks on RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256

RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256 are two hash functions used to generate the bitcoin address. In particular, RIPEMD-160 is an ISO/IEC standard and SHA-256 has been widely used in the world. Due to their complex designs, the progress to find (semi-free-start) collisions for the two hash functions is slow. Recently at EUROCRYPT 2023, Liu et al. presented the first collision attack on 36 steps of RIPEMD-160 and the first MILP-based method to find collision-generating signed differential characteristics. We continue this line of research and implement the MILP-based method with a SAT/SMT-based method. Furthermore, we observe that the collision attack on RIPEMD-160 can be improved to 40 steps with different message differences. We have practically found a colliding message pair for 40-step RIPEMD-160 in 16 hours with 115 threads. Moreover, we also report the first semi-free-start (SFS) colliding message pair for 39-step SHA-256, which can be found in about 3 hours with 120 threads. These results update the best (SFS) collision attacks on RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256. Especially, we have made some progress on SHA-256 since the last update on (SFS) collision attacks on it at EUROCRYPT 2013, where the first practical SFS collision attack on 38-step SHA-256 was found

Automating Collision Attacks on RIPEMD-160

As an ISO/IEC standard, the hash function RIPEMD-160 has been used to generate the Bitcoin address with SHA-256. However, due to the complex double-branch structure of RIPEMD-160, the best collision attack only reaches 36 out of 80 steps of RIPEMD-160, and the best semi-free-start (SFS) collision attack only reaches 40 steps. To improve the 36-step collision attack proposed at EUROCRYPT 2023, we explored the possibility of using different message differences to increase the number of attacked steps, and we finally identified one choice allowing a 40-step collision attack. To find the corresponding 40-step differential characteristic, we re-implement the MILP-based method to search for signed differential characteristics with SAT/SMT. As a result, we can find a colliding message pair for 40-step RIPEMD-160 in practical time, which significantly improves the best collision attack on RIPEMD-160. For the best SFS collision attack published at ToSC 2019, we observe that the bottleneck is the probability of the right-branch differential characteristics as they are fully uncontrolled in the message modification. To address this issue, we utilize our SAT/SMT-based tool to search for high-probability differential characteristics for the right branch. Consequently, we can mount successful SFS collision attacks on 41, 42 and 43 steps of RIPEMD-160, thus significantly improving the SFS collision attacks. In addition, we also searched for a 44-step differential characteristic, but the differential probability is too low to allow a meaningful SFS collision attack

Analysis of RIPEMD-160: New Collision Attacks and Finding Characteristics with MILP

The hash function RIPEMD-160 is an ISO/IEC standard and is being used to generate the bitcoin address together with SHA-256. Despite the fact that many hash functions in the MD-SHA hash family have been broken, RIPEMD-160 remains secure and the best collision attack could only reach up to 34 out of 80 rounds, which was published at CRYPTO 2019. In this paper, we propose a new collision attack on RIPEMD-160 that can reach up to 36 rounds with time complexity $2^{64.5}$. This new attack is facilitated by a new strategy to choose the message differences and new techniques to simultaneously handle the differential conditions on both branches. Moreover, different from all the previous work on RIPEMD-160, we utilize a MILP-based method to search for differential characteristics, where we construct a model to accurately describe the signed difference transitions through its round function. As far as we know, this is the first model targeting the signed difference transitions for the MD-SHA hash family. Indeed, we are more motivated to design this model by the fact that many automatic tools to search for such differential characteristics are not publicly available and implementing them from scratch is too time-consuming and difficult. Hence, we expect that this can be an alternative easy tool for future research, which only requires to write down some simple linear inequalities

Quantum Collision Attacks on Reduced SHA-256 and SHA-512

In this paper, we study dedicated quantum collision attacks on SHA-256 and SHA-512 for the first time. The attacks reach 38 and 39 steps, respectively, which significantly improve the classical attacks for 31 and 27 steps. Both attacks adopt the framework of the previous work that converts many semi-free-start collisions into a 2-block collision, and are faster than the generic attack in the cost metric of time-space tradeoff. We observe that the number of required semi-free-start collisions can be reduced in the quantum setting, which allows us to convert the previous classical 38 and 39 step semi-free-start collisions into a collision. The idea behind our attacks is simple and will also be applicable to other cryptographic hash functions