Meet-in-the-Middle Preimage Attacks on Double-Branch Hash Functions: Application to RIPEMD and Others

  • Authors:
  • Yu Sasaki;Kazumaro Aoki

  • Affiliations:
  • NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Tokyo, Japan 180-8585;NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Tokyo, Japan 180-8585

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

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Abstract

We describe preimage attacks on several double-branch hash functions. We first present meet-in-the-middle preimage attacks on RIPEMD, whose output length is 128 bits and internal state size is 256 bits. With this internal state size, a straightforward application of the meet-in-the-middle attack will cost the complexity of at least 2128, which gives no advantage compared to the brute force attack. We show two attacks on RIPEMD. The first attack finds pseudo-preimages and preimages of the first 33 steps with complexities of 2121 and 2125.5, respectively. The second attack finds pseudo-preimages and preimages of the intermediate 35 steps with complexities of 296 and 2113, respectively. We next present meet-in-the-middle preimage attacks on full Extended MD4, reduced RIPEMD-256, and reduced RIPEMD-320. The best known attack for these is the brute force attack. We show how to find preimages more efficiently on these hash functions.