IACR News item: 29 May 2015
Thomas Espitau, Pierre-Alain Fouque, Pierre Karpman
ePrint ReportIn this work, we exploit further the differential view of meet-in-the-middle techniques and generalize it to higher-order differentials. Despite being an important technique dating from the mid-90\'s, this is the first time higher-order differentials have been applied to meet-in-the-middle preimages. We show that doing so may lead to significant improvements to preimage attacks on hash functions with a simple linear message expansion. We extend the number of attacked rounds on SHA-1 to give a 62-round one-block preimage without padding, a 56-round one-block preimage with padding, and a
62-round two-block preimage with padding. We also apply our framework to the more recent SHA-3 finalist BLAKE and its newer variant BLAKE2, and give an attack for a 2.75-round preimage with padding, and a 7.5-round pseudo-preimage on the compression function.
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