Preimage resistance beyond the birthday bound: Double-length hashing revisited

Security proofs are an essential part of modern cryptography. Often the challenge is not to come up with appropriate schemes but rather to technically prove that these satisfy the desired security properties. We provide for the first time techniques for proving asymptotically optimal preimage resistance bounds for block cipher based double length, double call hash functions. More precisely, we consider for some \keylength>\blocklength compression functions H:\{0,1\}^{\keylength+\blocklength} \rightarrow \{0,1\}^{2\blocklength} using two calls to an ideal block cipher with an \blocklength-bit block size. Optimally, an adversary trying to find a preimage for $H$ should require \Omega(2^{2\blocklength}) queries to the underlying block cipher. As a matter of fact there have been several attempts to prove the preimage resistance of such compression functions, but no proof did go beyond the \Omega(2^{\blocklength}) barrier, therefore leaving a huge gap when compared to the optimal bound. In this paper, we introduce two new techniques on how to lift this bound to \Omega(2^{2\blocklength}). We demonstrate our new techniques for a simple and natural design of $H$, being the concatenation of two instances of the well-known Davies-Meyer compression function

Design and Analysis of Cryptographic Hash Functions

Wydział Matematyki i InformatykiKryptograficzne funkcje haszujące stanowią element składowy wielu algorytmów kryptograficznych. Przykładowymi zastosowaniami kryptograficznych funkcji haszujących są podpisy cyfrowe oraz kody uwierzytelniania wiadomości. Ich własności kryptograficzne mają znaczący wpływ na poziom bezpieczeństwa systemów kryptograficznych wykorzystujących haszowanie. W dysertacji analizowane są kryptograficzne funkcje haszujące oraz omówione główne zasady tworzenia bezpiecznych kryptograficznych funkcji haszujących. Analizujemy bezpieczeństwo dedykowanych funkcji haszujących (BMW, Shabal, SIMD, BLAKE2, Skein) oraz funkcji haszujących zbudowanych z szyfrów blokowych (Crypton, Hierocrypt-3, IDEA, SAFER++, Square). Głównymi metodami kryptoanalizy użytymi są skrócona analiza różnicowa, analiza rotacyjna i przesuwna. Uzyskane wyniki pokazują słabości analizowanych konstrukcji.Cryptographic Hash Functions (CHFs) are building blocks of many cryptographic algorithms. For instance, they are indispensable tools for efficient digital signature and authentication tags. Their security properties have tremendous impact on the security level of systems, which use cryptographic hashing. This thesis analyzes CHFs and studies the design principles for construction of secure and efficient CHFs. The dissertation investigates security of both dedicated hash functions (BMW, Shabal, SIMD, BLAKE2, Skein) and hash functions based on block ciphers (Crypton, Hierocrypt-3, IDEA, SAFER++, Square). The main cryptographic tools applied are truncated differentials, rotational and shift analysis. The findings show weaknesses in the designs

MJH: A Faster Alternative to MDC-2

Abstract. In this paper, we introduce a new class of double-block-length hash functions. Using the ideal cipher model, we prove that these hash functions, dubbed MJH, are asymptotically collision resistant up to O(2n(1−)) query complexity for any > 0 in the iteration, where n is the block size of the underlying blockcipher. When based on n-bit key blockciphers, our construction, being of rate 1/2, provides better provable security than MDC-2, the only known construction of a rate-1/2 double-length hash function based on an n-bit key blockcipher with non-trivial provable security. Moreover, since key scheduling is performed only once per message block for MJH, our proposal significantly outperforms MDC-2 in efficiency. When based on a 2n-bit key blockcipher, we can use the extra n bits of key to increase the amount of payload accordingly. Thus we get a rate-1 hash function that is much faster than existing proposals, such as Tandem-DM with comparable provable security. This is the full version of [19].

Security of Cyclic Double Block Length Hash Functions including Abreast-DM

We provide the first proof of security for Abreast-DM, one of the oldest and most well-known constructions for turning a block cipher with $n$-bit block length and $2n$-bit key length into a 2n-bit cryptographic hash function. In particular, we prove that when Abreast-DM is instantiated with AES-256, i.e. a block cipher with 128-bit block length and 256-bit key length, any adversary that asks less than 2^124.42 queries cannot find a collision with success probability greater than 1/2. Surprisingly, this about 15 years old construction is one of the few constructions that have the desirable feature of a near-optimal collision resistance guarantee. We generalize our techniques used in the proof of Abreast-DM to a huge class of double block length (DBL) hash functions that we will call Cyclic-DM. Using this generalized theorem we are able to derive several DBL constructions that lead to compression functions that even have a higher security guarantee and are more efficient than Abreast-DM. Furthermore we give DBL constructions that have the highest security guarantee of all DBL compression functions currently known in literature. We also provide an analysis of preimage resistance for Cyclic-DM compression functions. Note that this work has been already presented at Dagstuhl \u2709

Ideal-Cipher (Ir)reducibility for Blockcipher-Based Hash Functions

Preneel et al.~(Crypto 1993) assessed 64 possible ways to construct a compression function out of a blockcipher. They conjectured that 12 out of these 64 so-called PGV constructions achieve optimal security bounds for collision resistance and preimage resistance. This was proven by Black et al.~(Journal of Cryptology, 2010), if one assumes that the blockcipher is ideal. This result, however, does not apply to ``non-ideal\u27\u27 blockciphers such as AES. To alleviate this problem, we revisit the PGV constructions in light of the recently proposed idea of random-oracle reducibility (Baecher and Fischlin, Crypto 2011). We say that the blockcipher in one of the 12 secure PGV constructions reduces to the one in another construction, if \emph{any} secure instantiation of the cipher, ideal or not, for one construction also makes the other secure. This notion allows us to relate the underlying assumptions on blockciphers in different constructions, and show that the requirements on the blockcipher for one case are not more demanding than those for the other. It turns out that this approach divides the 12 secure constructions into two groups of equal size, where within each group a blockcipher making one construction secure also makes all others secure. Across the groups this is provably not the case, showing that the sets of ``good\u27\u27 blockciphers for each group are qualitatively distinct. We also relate the ideal ciphers in the PGV constructions with those in double-block-length hash functions such as Tandem-DM, Abreast-DM, and Hirose-DM. Here, our results show that, besides achieving better bounds, the double-block-length hash functions rely on weaker assumptions on the blockciphers to achieve collision and everywhere preimage resistance

The Security of Abreast-DM in the Ideal Cipher Model

In this paper, we give a security proof for Abreast-DM in terms of collision resistance and preimage resistance. As old as Tandem-DM, the compression function Abreast-DM is one of the most well-known constructions for double block length compression functions. The bounds on the number of queries for collision resistance and preimage resistance are given by O(2^n). Based on a novel technique using query-response cycles, our security proof is simpler than those for MDC-2 and Tandem-DM. We also present a wide class of Abreast-DM variants that enjoy a birthday-type security guarantee with a simple proof

Optimal Collision Security in Double Block Length Hashing with Single Length Key

The idea of double block length hashing is to construct a compression function on 2n bits using a block cipher with an n-bit block size. All optimally secure double length hash functions known in the literature employ a cipher with a key space of double block size, 2n-bit. On the other hand, no optimally secure compression functions built from a cipher with an n-bit key space are known. Our work deals with this problem. Firstly, we prove that for a wide class of compression functions with two calls to its underlying n-bit keyed block cipher collisions can be found in about 2n/2 queries. This attack applies, among others, to functions where the output is derived from the block cipher outputs in a linear way. This observation demonstrates that all security results of designs using a cipher with 2n-bit key space crucially rely on the presence of these extra n key bits. The main contribution of this work is a proof that this issue can be resolved by allowing the compression function to make one extra call to the cipher. We propose a family of compression functions making three block cipher calls that asymptotically achieves optimal collision resistance up to 2n(1-ε) queries and preimage resistance up to 23n(1-ε)/2 queries, for any ε > 0. To our knowledge, this is the first optimally collision secure double block length construction using a block cipher with single length key space. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2012.status: publishe