Cryptanalysis of hash functions with structures

Abstract

Hash function cryptanalysis has acquired many methods, tools and tricks from other areas, mostly block ciphers. In this paper another trick from block cipher cryptanalysis, the structures, is used for speeding up the collision search. We investigate the memory and the time complexities of this approach under different assumptions on the round functions. The power of the new attack is illustrated with the cryptanalysis of the hash functions Grindahl and the analysis of the SHA-3 candidate Fugue (both functions as 256 and 512 bit versions). The collision attack on Grindahl-512 is the first collision attack on this function. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.