Paper 2006/254 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2006/254 ↗

Applications of SAT Solvers to Cryptanalysis of Hash Functions

Ilya Mironov
Lintao Zhang
Abstract

Several standard cryptographic hash functions were broken in 2005. Some essential building blocks of these attacks lend themselves well to automation by encoding them as CNF formulas, which are within reach of modern SAT solvers. In this paper we demonstrate effectiveness of this approach. In particular, we are able to generate full collisions for MD4 and MD5 given only the differential path and applying a (minimally modified) off-the-shelf SAT solver. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a SAT-solver-aided cryptanalysis of a non-trivial cryptographic primitive. We expect SAT solvers to find new applications as a validation and testing tool of practicing cryptanalysts.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2006-07-27: last updated
2006-07-27: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2006/254
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2006/254,
      author = {Ilya Mironov and Lintao Zhang},
      title = {Applications of SAT Solvers to Cryptanalysis of Hash Functions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2006/254},
      year = {2006},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/254}
}
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