Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/675

The Usage of Counter Revisited: Second-Preimage Attack on New Russian Standardized Hash Function

Jian Guo and Jérémy Jean and Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin and Lei Wang

Abstract: Streebog is a new Russian hash function standard. It follows the HAIFA framework as domain extension algorithm and claims to resist recent generic second-preimage attacks with long messages. However, we demonstrate in this article that the specific instantiation of the HAIFA framework used in Streebog makes it weak against such attacks. More precisely, we observe that Streebog makes a rather poor usage of the HAIFA counter input in the compression function, which allows to construct second-preimages on the full Streebog-512 with a complexity as low as 2^{266} compression function evaluations for long messages. This complexity has to be compared with the expected 2^{512} computations bound that an ideal hash function should provide. Our work is a good example that one must be careful when using a design framework for which not all instances are secure. HAIFA helps designers to build a secure hash function, but one should pay attention to the way the counter is handled inside the compression function.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Streebog, cryptanalysis, second-preimage attack, diamond structure, expandable message, HAIFA

Original Publication (in the same form): SAC 2014

Date: received 29 Aug 2014

Contact author: JJean at ntu edu sg

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20140830:120453 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/675

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