### Applications of SAT Solvers to Cryptanalysis of Hash Functions

Ilya Mironov and Lintao Zhang

##### Abstract

Several standard cryptographic hash functions were broken in 2005. Some essential building blocks of these attacks lend themselves well to automation by encoding them as CNF formulas, which are within reach of modern SAT solvers. In this paper we demonstrate effectiveness of this approach. In particular, we are able to generate full collisions for MD4 and MD5 given only the differential path and applying a (minimally modified) off-the-shelf SAT solver. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a SAT-solver-aided cryptanalysis of a non-trivial cryptographic primitive. We expect SAT solvers to find new applications as a validation and testing tool of practicing cryptanalysts.

Note: This is the full version of the paper presented at SAT 06.

Available format(s)
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 06), pages 102--115, 2006
Keywords
hash functionscryptanalysisSAT solver
Contact author(s)
mironov @ microsoft com
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2006/254

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2006/254,
author = {Ilya Mironov and Lintao Zhang},
title = {Applications of SAT Solvers to Cryptanalysis of Hash Functions},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2006/254},
year = {2006},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/254}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/254}
}

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