Currently, a competition is under way to develop and choose the next standard in cryptographic hashing, to be named SHA-3. Thus far, the field of 64 entrants has been narrowed down to just 5 finalists, who have each faced intense scrutiny. One feature of these functions is their variability. They all have a variety of input parameters that allows for a fine level of control over the security and performance of the function. A multitude of attacks and analysis have been done on their full versions, but little research has been done on the statistical security of their reduced versions. This project provides a statistical analysis of candidates BLAKE, CubeHash, and Skein. Special software was designed and developed to generate a large amount of sample data. This data was fed into NIST’s Statistical Test Suite, a software application specifically developed to test for statistical randomness. Surprisingly, the reduced versions showed no weakness. When reducing the functions further by tampering with the hash calculation beyond the limits of the input parameters, it is possible to reveal statistical weakness in the resulting output.
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May 11th, 2012
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