Improved rebound attack on the finalist Grøstl

Abstract

Grøstl is one of the five finalist hash functions of the SHA-3 competition. For entering this final phase, the designers have tweaked the submitted versions. This tweak renders inapplicable the best known distinguishers on the compression function presented by Peyrin [18] that exploited the internal permutation properties. Since the beginning of the final round, very few analysis have been published on Grøstl. Currently, the best known rebound-based results on the permutation and the compression function for the 256-bit version work up to 8 rounds, and up to 7 rounds for the 512-bit version. In this paper, we present new rebound distinguishers that work on a higher number of rounds for the permutations of both 256 and 512-bit versions of this finalist, that is 9 and 10 respectively. Our distinguishers make use of an algorithm that we propose for solving three fully active states in the middle of the differential characteristic, while the Super-Sbox technique only handles two. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.