New Pseudo-Near-Collision Attack on Reduced-Round of Hamsi-256

Hamsi-256 is designed by Özgül Kücük and it has been a candidate Hash function for the second round of SHA-3. The compression function of Hamsi-256 maps a 256-bit chaining value and a 32-bit message to a new 256-bit chaining value. As hashing a message, Hamsi-256 operates 3-round except for the last message it operates 6-round. In this paper, we will give the pseudo-near-collision for 5-round Hamsi-256. By the message modifying, the pseudo-near-collision for 3, 4 and 5 rounds can be found with $2^5$, $2^{32}$ and $2^{125}$ compression function computations respectively

An Improved Algebraic Attack on Hamsi-256

Hamsi is one of the $14$ second-stage candidates in NIST\u27s SHA-3 competition. The only previous attack on this hash function was a very marginal attack on its 256-bit version published by Thomas Fuhr at Asiacrypt $2010$, which is better than generic attacks only for very short messages of fewer than $100$ 32-bit blocks, and is only $26$ times faster than a straightforward exhaustive search attack. In this paper we describe a different algebraic attack which is less marginal: It is better than the best known generic attack for all practical message sizes (up to $4$ gigabytes), and it outperforms exhaustive search by a factor of at least $512$. The attack is based on the observation that in order to discard a possible second preimage, it suffices to show that one of its hashed output bits is wrong. Since the output bits of the compression function of Hamsi-256 can be described by low degree polynomials, it is actually faster to compute a small number of output bits by a fast polynomial evaluation technique rather than via the official algorithm

Near Collisions for the Compress Function of Hamsi-256 Found by Genetic Algorithm

Hamsi is one of 14 remaining candidates in NIST\u27s Hash Competition for the future hash standard SHA-3 and Hamsi-256 is one of four kinds of Hamsi. In this paper we present a genetic algorithm to search near collisions for the compress function of Hamsi-256 , give a near collision on (256 − 20) bits and a near collision on (256 − 21) bits with four differences in the chaining value, and obtain a differential path for three rounds of Hamsi-256 with probability 1/2^24, 1/2^23 respectively, which are better than previous work reported about near collisions

Security of the SHA-3 candidates Keccak and Blue Midnight Wish: Zero-sum property

The SHA-3 competition for the new cryptographic standard was initiated by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007. In the following years, the event grew to one of the top areas currently being researched by the CS and cryptographic communities. The first objective of this thesis is to overview, analyse, and critique the SHA-3 competition. The second one is to perform an in-depth study of the security of two candidate hash functions, the finalist Keccak and the second round candidate Blue Midnight Wish. The study shall primarily focus on zero-sum distinguishers. First we attempt to attack reduced versions of these hash functions and see if any vulnerabilities can be detected. This is followed by attacks on their full versions. In the process, a novel approach is utilized in the search of zero-sum distinguishers by employing SAT solvers. We conclude that while such complex attacks can theoretically uncover undesired properties of the two hash functions presented, such attacks are still far from being fully realized due to current limitations in computing power

Haraka v2 – Efficient Short-Input Hashing for Post-Quantum Applications

Recently, many efficient cryptographic hash function design strategies have been explored, not least because of the SHA-3 competition. These designs are, almost exclusively, geared towards high performance on long inputs. However, various applications exist where the performance on short (fixed length) inputs matters more. Such hash functions are the bottleneck in hash-based signature schemes like SPHINCS or XMSS, which is currently under standardization. Secure functions specifically designed for such applications are scarce. We attend to this gap by proposing two short-input hash functions (or rather simply compression functions). By utilizing AES instructions on modern CPUs, our proposals are the fastest on such platforms, reaching throughputs below one cycle per hashed byte even for short inputs, while still having a very low latency of less than 60 cycles. Under the hood, this results comes with several innovations. First, we study whether the number of rounds for our hash functions can be reduced, if only second-preimage resistance (and not collision resistance) is required. The conclusion is: only a little. Second, since their inception, AES-like designs allow for supportive security arguments by means of counting and bounding the number of active S-boxes. However, this ignores powerful attack vectors using truncated differentials, including the powerful rebound attacks. We develop a general tool-based method to include arguments against attack vectors using truncated differentials

New Insights into Divide-and-Conquer Attacks on the Round-Reduced Keccak-MAC

Keccak is the final winner of SHA-3 competition and it can be used as message authentic codes as well. The basic and balanced divide-and-conquer attacks on Keccak-MAC were proposed by Dinur et al. at Eurocrypt 2015. The idea of cube attacks is used in the two attacks to divide key bits into small portions. In this paper, by carefully analysing the mappings used in Keccak-MAC, it is found that some cube variables could divide key bits into smaller portions and so better divide-and-conquer attacks are obtained. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the resistance of Keccak-MAC against divide-and-conquer attacks based on cubes, we theoretically analyse the lower bounds of the complexities of divide-and-conquer attacks. It is shown that the lower bounds of the complexities are still not better than those of the conditional cube tester proposed by Senyang Huang et al.. This indicates that Keccak-MAC can resist the divide-and-conquer attack better than the conditional cube tester. We hope that these techniques still could provide some new insights on the future cryptanalysis of Keccak

Too Much Crypto

We show that many symmetric cryptography primitives would not be less safe with significantly fewer rounds. To support this claim, we review the cryptanalysis progress in the last 20 years, examine the reasons behind the current number of rounds, and analyze the risk of doing fewer rounds. Advocating a rational and scientific approach to round numbers selection, we propose revised number of rounds for AES, BLAKE2, ChaCha, and SHA-3, which offer more consistent security margins across primitives and make them much faster, without increasing the security risk

Cryptanalysis of Some AES-based Cryptographic Primitives

Current information security systems rely heavily on symmetric key cryptographic primitives as one of their basic building blocks. In order to boost the efficiency of the security systems, designers of the underlying primitives often tend to avoid the use of provably secure designs. In fact, they adopt ad hoc designs with claimed security assumptions in the hope that they resist known cryptanalytic attacks. Accordingly, the security evaluation of such primitives continually remains an open field. In this thesis, we analyze the security of two cryptographic hash functions and one block cipher. We primarily focus on the recent AES-based designs used in the new Russian Federation cryptographic hashing and encryption suite GOST because the majority of our work was carried out during the open research competition run by the Russian standardization body TC26 for the analysis of their new cryptographic hash function Streebog. Although, there exist security proofs for the resistance of AES- based primitives against standard differential and linear attacks, other cryptanalytic techniques such as integral, rebound, and meet-in-the-middle attacks have proven to be effective. The results presented in this thesis can be summarized as follows: Initially, we analyze various security aspects of the Russian cryptographic hash function GOST R 34.11-2012, also known as Streebog or Stribog. In particular, our work investigates five security aspects of Streebog. Firstly, we present a collision analysis of the compression function and its in- ternal cipher in the form of a series of modified rebound attacks. Secondly, we propose an integral distinguisher for the 7- and 8-round compression function. Thirdly, we investigate the one wayness of Streebog with respect to two approaches of the meet-in-the-middle attack, where we present a preimage analysis of the compression function and combine the results with a multicollision attack to generate a preimage of the hash function output. Fourthly, we investigate Streebog in the context of malicious hashing and by utilizing a carefully tailored differential path, we present a backdoored version of the hash function where collisions can be generated with practical complexity. Lastly, we propose a fault analysis attack which retrieves the inputs of the compression function and utilize it to recover the secret key when Streebog is used in the keyed simple prefix and secret-IV MACs, HMAC, or NMAC. All the presented results are on reduced round variants of the function except for our analysis of the malicious version of Streebog and our fault analysis attack where both attacks cover the full round hash function. Next, we examine the preimage resistance of the AES-based Maelstrom-0 hash function which is designed to be a lightweight alternative to the ISO standardized hash function Whirlpool. One of the distinguishing features of the Maelstrom-0 design is the proposal of a new chaining construction called 3CM which is based on the 3C/3C+ family. In our analysis, we employ a 4-stage approach that uses a modified technique to defeat the 3CM chaining construction and generates preimages of the 6-round reduced Maelstrom-0 hash function. Finally, we provide a key recovery attack on the new Russian encryption standard GOST R 34.12- 2015, also known as Kuznyechik. Although Kuznyechik adopts an AES-based design, it exhibits a faster diffusion rate as it employs an optimal diffusion transformation. In our analysis, we propose a meet-in-the-middle attack using the idea of efficient differential enumeration where we construct a three round distinguisher and consequently are able to recover 16-bytes of the master key of the reduced 5-round cipher. We also present partial sequence matching, by which we generate, store, and match parts of the compared parameters while maintaining negligible probability of matching error, thus the overall online time complexity of the attack is reduced