Spring 2010 Cryptography II Term Paper

Collision Attacks Against CubeHash

by Darryl Eychner

Abstract

Currently, a competition to develop the new standard in cryptographic hash functions is underway. Sponsored by NIST, the winner will become SHA-3 and replace SHA-2 as the standard in cryptographic hashing. These hash functions have multiple purposes, such as providing a mechanism for digital signatures and commitment assurance. Naturally, these functions should be secure, however, existing attacks could prove to be a threat to that goal. To date, a few researchers have broken variants of the CubeHash candidate by searching for collisions in the compression function, knowing that a collision there will result in a collision for the function as a whole. This paper discusses current knowledge that can be applied to attacking the CubeHash candidate with an emphasis on current techniques, their usage, and results.

Paper and Presentation

Here, you can download the finished paper and its presentation in PDF format.

References

[2] Brier, Eric, Shahram Khazaei, Willi Meier, and Thomas Peyrin. Linearization Framework for Collision Attacks: Application to CubeHash and MD6 (extended version). Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2009/382, 2009. http://eprint.iacr.org.

[3] J-P.Aumasson, W.Meier, M.Naya-Plasencia and T.Peyrin. Inside the Hypercube. In C.Boyd and J. Gonzalez Nieto editors, Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy ACISP 2009, volume 5594 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 202-213. Springer-Verlag, 2009.

[4] Khazaei, Shahram, Simon Knellwolf, Willi Meier, and Deian Stefan. "Improved Linear Differential Attacks On CubeHash." AFRICACRYPT (2010). Print.

Known Collisions

[2] Dmitry Khovratovich, Ivica Nikolc, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann. Preimage attack on CubeHash512-r/4 and CubeHash512-r/8