Distinguishing Attack on the Secret-Prefix MAC Based on the 39-Step SHA-256

  • Authors:
  • Hongbo Yu;Xiaoyun Wang

  • Affiliations:
  • Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 100084;Tsinghua University and Shandong University, China

  • Venue:
  • ACISP '09 Proceedings of the 14th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we present the first distinguishing attack on the LPMAC based on step-reduced SHA-256. The LPMAC is the abbreviation of the secret-prefix MAC with the length prepended to the message before hashing and it's a more secure version of the secret-prefix MAC. In [19], Wang e t al. give the first distinguishing attack on HMAC/NMAC-MD5 without the related key, then they improve the techniques to give a distinguishing attack on the LPMAC based on 61-step SHA-1 in [23]. In this paper, we utilize the techniques in [23] combined with our differential path on step-reduced SHA-256 to distinguishing the LPMAC based on 39-step SHA-256 from the LPMAC with a random function. The complexity of our attack is about 2184.5 MAC queries.