The Rebound Attack: Cryptanalysis of Reduced Whirlpool and Grøstl

Florian Mendel, Christian Rechberger, Martin Schläffer, Søren Steffen Thomsen

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    In this work, we propose the rebound attack, a new tool for the cryptanalysis of hash functions. The idea of the rebound attack is to use the available degrees of freedom in a collision attack to efficiently bypass the low probability parts of a differential trail. The rebound attack consists of an inbound phase with a match-in-the-middle part to exploit the available degrees of freedom, and a subsequent probabilistic outbound phase. Especially on AES based hash functions, the rebound attack leads to new attacks for a surprisingly high number of rounds. We use the rebound attack to construct collisions for 4.5 rounds of the 512-bit hash function Whirlpool with a complexity of 2^120 compression function evaluations and negligible memory requirements. The attack can be extended to a near-collision on 7.5 rounds of the compression function of Whirlpool and 8.5 rounds of the similar hash function Maelstrom. Additionally, we apply the rebound attack to the SHA-3 submission Grøstl, which leads to an attack on 6 rounds of the Grøstl-256 compression function with a complexity of 2^120 and memory requirements of about 2^64.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationFast Software Encryption : 16th International Workshop, FSE 2009 Leuven, Belgium, February 22-25, 2009 Revised Selected Papers
    EditorsOrr Dunkelman
    PublisherSpringer
    Publication date2009
    Pages260-276
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2009
    EventFast Software Encryption 2009 - Leuven, Belgium
    Duration: 22 Feb 200925 Feb 2009
    Conference number: 16
    http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/fse/fse2009.html

    Conference

    ConferenceFast Software Encryption 2009
    Number16
    Country/TerritoryBelgium
    CityLeuven
    Period22/02/200925/02/2009
    Internet address
    SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
    Number5665

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