Cryptanalysis of the CRUSH hash function

Abstract

Iterated Halving has been suggested as a replacement to the Merkle-Damgård construction following attacks on the MDx family of hash functions. The core of the scheme is an iterated block cipher that provides keying and input material for future rounds. The CRUSH hash function provides a specific instantiation of the block cipher for Iterated Halving. In this paper, we identify structural problems with the scheme, and show that by using a bijective function, such as the block cipher used in CRUSH or the AES, we can trivially identify collisions and second preimages on many equal-length messages of length ten blocks or more. The cost is ten decryptions of the block cipher, this being less than the generation of a single digest. We show that even if Iterated Halving is repaired, the construction has practical issues that means it is not suitable for general deployment. We conclude this paper with the somewhat obvious statement that CRUSH, and more generally Iterated Halving, should not be used. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.