Paper 2021/575 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2021/575 ↗

Superposition Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks: Updates on Fundamental Security of AES-like Hashing

Zhenzhen Bao
Jian Guo
Danping Shi
Yi Tu
Abstract

The Meet-in-the-Middle approach is one of the most powerful cryptanalysis techniques, demonstrated by its applications in preimage attacks on the full MD4, MD5, Tiger, HAVAL, and Haraka-512 v2 hash functions, and key recovery of the full block cipher KTANTAN. The success relies on the separation of a primitive into two independent chunks, where each active cell of the state is used to represent only one chunk or is otherwise considered unusable once mixed. We observe that some of such cells are linearly mixed and can be as useful as the independent ones. This leads to the introduction of superposition states and a whole suite of accompanied techniques, which we incorporate into the MILP-based search framework proposed by Bao et al. at EUROCRYPT 2021 and Dong et al. at CRYPTO 2021, and find applications on a wide range of AES-like hash functions and block ciphers.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2022-06-23: last updated
2021-05-03: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/575
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/575,
      author = {Zhenzhen Bao and Jian Guo and Danping Shi and Yi Tu},
      title = {Superposition Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks: Updates on Fundamental Security of AES-like Hashing},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/575},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/575}
}
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