Meet-in-the-middle preimage attacks against reduced SHA-0 and SHA-1

Abstract

Preimage resistance of several hash functions has already been broken by the meet-in-the-middle attacks and they utilize a property that their message schedules consist of only permutations of message words. It is unclear whether this type of attacks is applicable to a hash function whose message schedule does not consist of permutations of message words. This paper proposes new attacks against reduced SHA-0 and SHA-1 hash functions by analyzing a message schedule that does not consist of permutations but linear combinations of message words. The newly developed cryptanalytic techniques enable the meet-in-the-middle attack to be applied to reduced SHA-0 and SHA-1 hash functions. The attacks find preimages of SHA-0 and SHA-1 in 2156.6 and 2159.3 compression function computations up to 52 and 48 steps, respectively, compared to the brute-force attack, which requires 2160 compression function computations. The previous best attacks find preimages up to 49 and 44 steps, respectively. © 2009 Springer.