Non-Linear Reduced Round Attacks Against SHA-2 Hash family

Most of the attacks against (reduced) SHA-2 family in literature have used local collisions which are valid for linearized version of SHA-2 hash functions. Recently, at FSE \u2708, an attack against reduced round SHA-256 was presented by Nikolić and Biryukov which used a local collision which is valid for the actual SHA-256 function. It is a 9-step local collision which starts by introducing a modular difference of 1 in the two messages. It succeeds with probability roughly 1/3. We build on the work of Nikolić and Biryukov and provide a generalized nonlinear local collision which accepts an arbitrary initial message difference. This local collision succeeds with probability 1. Using this local collision we present attacks against 18-step SHA-256 and 18-step SHA-512 with arbitrary initial difference. Both of these attacks succeed with probability 1. We then present special cases of our local collision and show two different differential paths for attacking 20-step SHA-256 and 20-step SHA-512. One of these paths is the same as presented by Nikolić and Biryukov while the other one is a new differential path. Messages following both these differential paths can be found with probability 1. This improves on the previous result where the success probability of 20-step attack was 1/3. Finally, we present two differential paths for 21-step collisions for SHA-256 and SHA-512, one of which is a new path. The success probability of these paths for SHA-256 is roughly $2^{-15}$ and $2^{-17}$ which improves on the 21-step attack having probability $2^{-19}$ reported earlier. We show examples of message pairs following all the presented differential paths for up to 21-step collisions in SHA-256. We also show first real examples of colliding message pairs for up to 20-step reduced SHA-512

Estimating the cost of generic quantum pre-image attacks on SHA-2 and SHA-3

We investigate the cost of Grover's quantum search algorithm when used in the context of pre-image attacks on the SHA-2 and SHA-3 families of hash functions. Our cost model assumes that the attack is run on a surface code based fault-tolerant quantum computer. Our estimates rely on a time-area metric that costs the number of logical qubits times the depth of the circuit in units of surface code cycles. As a surface code cycle involves a significant classical processing stage, our cost estimates allow for crude, but direct, comparisons of classical and quantum algorithms. We exhibit a circuit for a pre-image attack on SHA-256 that is approximately $2^{153.8}$ surface code cycles deep and requires approximately $2^{12.6}$ logical qubits. This yields an overall cost of $2^{166.4}$ logical-qubit-cycles. Likewise we exhibit a SHA3-256 circuit that is approximately $2^{146.5}$ surface code cycles deep and requires approximately $2^{20}$ logical qubits for a total cost of, again, $2^{166.5}$ logical-qubit-cycles. Both attacks require on the order of $2^{128}$ queries in a quantum black-box model, hence our results suggest that executing these attacks may be as much as $275$ billion times more expensive than one would expect from the simple query analysis.Comment: Same as the published version to appear in the Selected Areas of Cryptography (SAC) 2016. Comments are welcome

The Miner's Dilemma

An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital currencies and related services. A natural process leads participants of such systems to form pools, where members aggregate their power and share the rewards. Experience with Bitcoin shows that the largest pools are often open, allowing anyone to join. It has long been known that a member can sabotage an open pool by seemingly joining it but never sharing its proofs of work. The pool shares its revenue with the attacker, and so each of its participants earns less. We define and analyze a game where pools use some of their participants to infiltrate other pools and perform such an attack. With any number of pools, no-pool-attacks is not a Nash equilibrium. With two pools, or any number of identical pools, there exists an equilibrium that constitutes a tragedy of the commons where the pools attack one another and all earn less than they would have if none had attacked. For two pools, the decision whether or not to attack is the miner's dilemma, an instance of the iterative prisoner's dilemma. The game is played daily by the active Bitcoin pools, which apparently choose not to attack. If this balance breaks, the revenue of open pools might diminish, making them unattractive to participants

Cube attacks on cryptographic hash functions

Cryptographic hash functions are a vital part of our current computer sys- tems. They are a core component of digital signatures, message authentica- tion codes, file checksums, and many other protocols and security schemes. Recent attacks against well-established hash functions have led NIST to start an international competition to develop a new hashing standard to be named SHA-3. In this thesis, we provide cryptanalysis of some of the SHA-3 candidates. We do this using a new cryptanalytical technique introduced a few months ago called cube attacks. In addition to summarizing the technique, we build on it by providing a framework for estimating its potential effectiveness for cases too computationally expensive to test. We then show that cube at- tacks can not only be applied to keyed cryptosystems but also to hash func- tions by way of a partial preimage attack. We successfully apply this attack to reduced-round variants of the ESSENCE and Keccak SHA-3 candidates and provide a detailed analysis of how and why the cube attacks succeeded. We also discuss the limits of theoretically extending these attacks to higher rounds. Finally, we provide some preliminary results of applying cube attacks to other SHA-3 candidates

Analysis and Design Security Primitives Based on Chaotic Systems for eCommerce

Security is considered the most important requirement for the success of electronic commerce, which is built based on the security of hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators. Chaotic systems and security algorithms have similar properties including sensitivity to any change or changes in the initial parameters, unpredictability, deterministic nature and random-like behaviour. Several security algorithms based on chaotic systems have been proposed; unfortunately some of them were found to be insecure and/or slow. In view of this, designing new secure and fast security algorithms based on chaotic systems which guarantee integrity, authentication and confidentiality is essential for electronic commerce development. In this thesis, we comprehensively explore the analysis and design of security primitives based on chaotic systems for electronic commerce: hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators. Novel hash functions, encryption algorithms and pseudorandom number generators based on chaotic systems for electronic commerce are proposed. The securities of the proposed algorithms are analyzed based on some well-know statistical tests in this filed. In addition, a new one-dimensional triangle-chaotic map (TCM) with perfect chaotic behaviour is presented. We have compared the proposed chaos-based hash functions, block cipher and pseudorandom number generator with well-know algorithms. The comparison results show that the proposed algorithms are better than some other existing algorithms. Several analyses and computer simulations are performed on the proposed algorithms to verify their characteristics, confirming that these proposed algorithms satisfy the characteristics and conditions of security algorithms. The proposed algorithms in this thesis are high-potential for adoption in e-commerce applications and protocols

Security Analysis of a Blockchain Network

Blockchains have gained popularity due to their versatility and wide range of application. Blockchains are a decentralized data structure guaranteeing integrity and non-repudiation of data We use this to secure provenance meta-data. A blockchain can be seen as a distributed database, or a public ledger of transactions or digital events that have occurred and have been shared among participating parties. A consensus is required to verify each transaction. Blockchains are finding use in cryptocurrencies, academics, clinical trials, healthcare and agriculture. However, like other networks, we need to verify the robustness and availability of the blockchain networks. In this thesis, we leverage existing Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service [D/DoS] attacks as a tool to evaluate our proposed blockchain technology, Scrybe, for robustness. First, we check its performance in presence of Transmission Control Protocol [TCP]- based flooding attacks such as SYN Flooding and its variants. We also optimize TCP kernel parameters to improve the utility of syn cookies as a measure against SYN floods. Second, we evaluate malicious miner attempts to exclude client transactions by stalling the mining process and verify that consensus is reached as long as there is at least one honest miner in the network. The underlying algorithm of Scrybe is our novel Lightweight Mining [LWM] algorithm. Our technology guarantees the properties of data integrity and non-repudiation with minimal resource requirements. It introduces a way to mine new blocks in the blockchain, which is not a resource hungry Proof-of-Work [PoW] as required in many present-day cryptocurrency applications