Linear analysis of reduced-round CubeHash

Tomer Ashur, Orr Dunkelman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
16 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Recent developments in the field of cryptanalysis of hash functions has inspired NIST to announce a competition for selecting a new cryptographic hash function to join the SHA family of standards. One of the 14 second-round candidates was CubeHash designed by Daniel J. Bernstein. CubeHash is a unique hash function in the sense that it does not iterate a common compression function, and offers a structure which resembles a sponge function, even though it is not exactly a sponge function.

In this paper we analyze reduced-round variants of CubeHash where the adversary controls the full 1024-bit input to reduced-round CubeHash and can observe its full output. We show that linear approximations with high biases exist in reduced-round variants. For example, we present an 11-round linear approximation with bias of 2 235, which allows distinguishing 11-round CubeHash using about 2470 queries. We also discuss the extension of this distinguisher to 12 rounds using message modification techniques. Finally, we present a linear distinguisher for 14-round CubeHash which uses about 2812 queries.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security
EditorsJ. Lopez, G. Tsudik
Place of PublicationBerlin
PublisherSpringer
Pages462-478
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-21554-4
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-21553-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
EventApplied Cryptography and Network Security - 9th International Conference - Nerja, Spain
Duration: 7 Jun 201110 Jun 2011
Conference number: 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringerLink
Volume6715

Conference

ConferenceApplied Cryptography and Network Security - 9th International Conference
Abbreviated titleACNS
Country/TerritorySpain
CityNerja
Period7/06/1110/06/11

Keywords

  • CubeHash
  • SHA-3 competition
  • Linear cryptanalysis

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