Security analysis of the whirlpool hash function in the cloud of things

Abstract

With the advancement and deployment of leading-edge telecommunication technologies for sensing and collecting, computing related information, Cloud of Things (CoTs) has emerged as a typical application platform that is envisioned to revolutionize the daily activities of human society, such as intelligent transportation, modern logistics, food safety, environmental monitoring, etc. To avoid any possible malicious attack and resource abuse, employing hash functions is widely recognized as one of the most effective approaches for CoTs to achieve message integrity and data authentication. The Whirlpool hash function has served as part of the joint ISO/IEC 10118-3 International Standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). In this paper, we propose an effective differential fault analysis on Whirlpool in the byte-oriented random fault model. The mathematical analysis and experimental results show that 8 random faults on average are required to obtain the current 512-bit message input of whirlpool and the secret key of HMAC-Whirlpool. Our work demonstrates that Whirlpool and HMAC-Whirlpool are both vulnerable to the single byte differential fault analysis. It provides a new reference for the security analysis of the same structure of the hash functions in the CoTs.