Cryptanalysis of SHA-0 and Reduced SHA-1

Abstract

We present new techniques for the cryptanalysis of hash functions. Our contributions are two-fold: both on the search level of the compression function and on the meta-structure. The former led to the neutral bits technique, while the latter led to the multi-block technique. The usefulness of these techniques is demonstrated on SHA-0 and SHA-1, but they are applicable to other hash functions as well. We use these techniques to find a collision of the full SHA-0 which is the first published collision of this function, and very efficient collision attacks on reduced versions of SHA-1.