IACR News item: 20 November 2015
Ciaran Mullan, Boaz Tsaban
ePrint Reportfield with $q$ elements.
Modulo a well supported number theoretic hypothesis, which holds in particular for concrete
homomorphisms proposed thus far, we provide a worst case to average case reduction for these hash functions:
upto a logarithmic factor, a random homomorphism is as secure as _any_ concrete homomorphism.
For a family of homomorphisms containing several concrete proposals in the literature,
we prove that collisions of length O(log(q)) can be found in running time O(sqrt(q)).
For general homomorphisms we offer an algorithm that, heuristically and according to experiments,
in running time O(sqrt(q)) finds collisions of length O(log(q)) for q even, and length O(log^2(q)/loglog(q))$ for arbitrary q.
While exponetial time, our algorithms are faster in practice than all earlier generic algorithms,
and produce much shorter collisions.
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