Meet-in-the-middle attacks on SHA-3 candidates

Abstract

We present preimage attacks on the SHA-3 candidates Boole, EnRUPT, Edon-R, and Sarmal, which are found to be vulnerable against a meet-in-the-middle attack. The idea is to invert (or partially invert) the compression function and to exploit its non-randomness. To launch an attack on a large internal state we manipulate the message blocks to be injected in order to fix some part of the internal state and to reduce the complexity of the attack. To lower the memory complexity of the attack we use the memoryless meet-in-the-middle approach proposed by Morita-Ohta-Miyaguchi. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.