A simple related-key attack on the full SHACAL-1

  • Authors:
  • Eli Biham;Orr Dunkelman;Nathan Keller

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel;Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel;Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

  • Venue:
  • CT-RSA'07 Proceedings of the 7th Cryptographers' track at the RSA conference on Topics in Cryptology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

SHACAL-1 is a 160-bit block cipher with variable key length of up to 512-bit key based on the hash function SHA-1. It was submitted to the NESSIE project and was accepted as a finalist for the 2nd phase of evaluation. Since its introduction, SHACAL-1 withstood extensive cryptanalytic efforts. The best known key recovery attack on the full cipher up to this paper has a time complexity of about 2420 encryptions. In this paper we use an observation due to Saarinen to present an elegant related-key attack on SHACAL-1. The attack can be mounted using two to eight unknown related keys, where each additional key reduces the time complexity of retrieving the actual values of the keys by a factor of 262. When all eight related-keys are used, the attack requires 2101.3 related-key chosen plaintexts and has a running time of 2101.3 encryptions. This is the first successful related-key key recovery attack on a cipher with varying round constants.