## CryptoDB

### Gaoli Wang

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2022
TOSC
ZUC-256 is a stream cipher designed for 5G applications by the ZUC team. Together with AES-256 and SNOW-V, it is currently being under evaluation for standardized algorithms in 5G mobile telecommunications by Security Algorithms Group of Experts (SAGE). A notable feature of the round update function of ZUC-256 is that many operations are defined over different fields, which significantly increases the difficulty to analyze the algorithm.As a main contribution, with the tools of the modular difference, signed difference and XOR difference, we develop new techniques to carefully control the interactions between these operations defined over different fields. At first glance, our techniques are somewhat similar to those developed by Wang et al. for the MD-SHA hash family. However, as ZUC-256 is quite different from the MD-SHA hash family and its round function is much more complex, we are indeed dealing with different problems and overcoming new obstacles.As main results, by utilizing complex input differences, we can present the first distinguishing attacks on 31 out of 33 rounds of ZUC-256 and 30 out of 33 rounds of the new version of ZUC-256 called ZUC-256-v2 with low time and data complexities, respectively. These attacks target the initialization phase and work in the related-key model with weak keys. Moreover, with a novel IV-correcting technique, we show how to efficiently recover at least 16 key bits for 15-round ZUC-256 and 14-round ZUC-256-v2 in the related-key setting, respectively. It is unpredictable whether our attacks can be further extended to more rounds with more advanced techniques. Based on the current attacks, we believe that the full 33 initialization rounds provide marginal security.
2022
ASIACRYPT
By exploiting the feature of partial nonlinear layers, we propose a new technique called algebraic meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to analyze the security of LowMC, which can reduce the memory complexity of the simple difference enumeration attack over the state-of-the-art. Moreover, while an efficient algebraic technique to retrieve the full key from a differential trail of LowMC has been proposed at CRYPTO 2021, its time complexity is still exponential in the key size. In this work, we show how to reduce it to constant time when there are a sufficiently large number of active S-boxes in the trail. With the above new techniques, the attacks on LowMC and LowMC-M published at CRYPTO 2021 are further improved, and some LowMC instances could be broken for the first time. Our results seem to indicate that partial nonlinear layers are still not well-understood.
2019
CRYPTO
RIPEMD-160 is an ISO/IEC standard and has been applied to generate the Bitcoin address with SHA-256. Due to the complex dual-stream structure, the first collision attack on reduced RIPEMD-160 presented by Liu, Mendel and Wang at Asiacrypt 2017 only reaches 30 steps, having a time complexity of $2^{70}$. Apart from that, several semi-free-start collision attacks have been published for reduced RIPEMD-160 with the start-from-the-middle method. Inspired from such start-from-the middle structures, we propose two novel efficient collision attack frameworks for reduced RIPEMD-160 by making full use of the weakness of its message expansion. Those two frameworks are called dense-left-and-sparse-right (DLSR) framework and sparse-left-and-dense-right (SLDR) framework. As it turns out, the DLSR framework is more efficient than SLDR framework since one more step can be fully controlled, though with extra $2^{32}$ memory complexity. To construct the best differential characteristics for the DLSR framework, we carefully build the linearized part of the characteristics and then solve the corresponding nonlinear part using a guess-and-determine approach. Based on the newly discovered differential characteristics, we provide colliding messages pairs for the first practical collision attacks on 30 and 31 (out of 80) steps of RIPEMD-160 with time complexity $2^{35.9}$ and $2^{41.5}$ respectively. In addition, benefiting from the partial calculation, we can attack 33 and 34 (out of 80) steps of RIPEMD-160 with time complexity $2^{67.1}$ and $2^{74.3}$ respectively. When applying the SLDR framework to the differential characteristic used in the Asiacrypt 2017 paper, we significantly improve the time complexity by a factor of $2^{13}$. However, it still cannot compete with the results obtained from the DLSR framework. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best collision attacks on reduced RIPEMD-160 with respect to the number of steps, including the first colliding message pairs for 30 and 31 steps of RIPEMD-160.
2019
TOSC
RIPEMD-160 is a hash function published in 1996, which shares similarities with other hash functions designed in this time-period like MD4, MD5 and SHA-1. However, for RIPEMD-160, no (semi-free-start) collision attacks on the full number of steps are known. Hence, it is still used, e.g., to generate Bitcoin addresses together with SHA-256, and is an ISO/IEC standard. Due to its dual-stream structure, even semifree- start collision attacks starting from the first step only reach 36 steps, which were firstly shown by Mendel et al. at Asiacrypt 2013 and later improved by Liu, Mendel and Wang at Asiacrypt 2017. Both of the attacks are based on a similar freedom degree utilization technique as proposed by Landelle and Peyrin at Eurocrypt 2013. However, the best known semi-free-start collision attack on 36 steps of RIPEMD-160 presented at Asiacrypt 2017 still requires 255.1 time and 232 memory. Consequently, a practical semi-free-start collision attack for the first 36 steps of RIPEMD-160 still requires a significant amount of resources. Considering the structure of these previous semi-free-start collision attacks for 36 steps of RIPEMD-160, it seems hard to extend it to more steps. Thus, we develop a different semi-free-start collision attack framework for reduced RIPEMD-160 by carefully investigating the message expansion of RIPEMD-160. Our new framework has several advantages. First of all, it allows to extend the attacks to more steps. Second, the memory complexity of the attacks is negligible. Hence, we were able to mount semi-free-start collision attacks on 36 and 37 steps of RIPEMD-160 with practical time complexity 241 and 249 respectively. Additionally, we describe semi-free-start collision attacks on 38 and 40 (out of 80) steps of RIPEMD-160 with time complexity 252 and 274.6, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best semi-free-start collision attacks for RIPEMD-160 starting from the first step with respect to the number of steps, including the first practical colliding message pairs for 36 and 37 steps of RIPEMD-160.
2017
ASIACRYPT
2017
TOSC
In this paper, we show how to theoretically compute the step differential probability of RIPEMD-160 under the condition that only one internal variable contains difference and the difference is a power of 2. Inspired by the way of computing the differential probability, we can do message modification such that a step differential hold with probability 1. Moreover, we propose a semi-free-start collision attack on 48-step RIPEMD-160, which improves the best semi-free start collision by 6 rounds. This is mainly due to that some bits of the chaining variable in the i-th step can be computed by adding some conditions in advance, even though some chaining variables before step i are unknown. Therefore, the uncontrolled probability of the differential path is increased and the number of the needed starting points is decreased. Then a semi-free-start collision attack on 48-step RIPEMD-160 can be obtained based on the differential path constructed by Mendel et al. at ASIACRYPT 2013. The experiments confirm our reasoning and complexity analysis.

Eurocrypt 2022

#### Coauthors

Zhenfu Cao (2)
Christoph Dobraunig (2)
Takanori Isobe (4)
Ryoma Ito (1)
Fukang Liu (6)
Willi Meier (2)
Florian Mendel (3)
Santanu Sarkar (2)
Yanzhao Shen (1)