Speeding up Collision Search for Byte-Oriented Hash Functions

peer reviewedWe describe a new tool for the search of collisions for hash functions. The tool is applicable when an attack is based on a differential trail, whose probability determines the complexity of the attack. Using the linear algebra methods we show how to organize the search so that many (in some cases — all) trail conditions are always satisfied thus significantly reducing the number of trials and the overall complexity. The method is illustrated with the collision and second preimage attacks on the compression functions based on Rijndael. We show that slow diffusion in the Rijndael (and AES) key schedule allows to run an attack on a version with a 13-round compression function, and the S-boxes do not prevent the attack. We finally propose how to modify the key schedule to resist the attack and provide lower bounds on the complexity of the generic differential attacks for our modification