### Cryptanalysis of ESSENCE

Maria Naya-Plasencia, Andrea Röck, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Yann Laigle-Chapuy, Gaëtan Leurent, Willi Meier, and Thomas Peyrin

##### Abstract

ESSENCE is a hash function submitted to the NIST Hash Competition that stands out as a hardware-friendly and highly parallelizable design. Previous analysis showed some non-randomness in the compression function which could not be extended to an attack on the hash function and ESSENCE remained unbroken. Preliminary analysis in its documentation argues that it resists standard differential cryptanalysis. This paper disproves this claim, showing that advanced techniques can be used to significantly reduce the cost of such attacks: using a manually found differential characteristic and an advanced search algorithm, we obtain collision attacks on the full ESSENCE-256 and ESSENCE-512, with respective complexities 2^67.4 and 2^134.7. In addition, we show how to use these attacks to forge valid (message, MAC) pairs for HMAC-ESSENCE-256 and HMAC-ESSENCE-512, essentially at the same cost as a collision.

Note: To appear at FSE 2010.

Available format(s)
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
hash functioncollisionSHA-3NIST hash competition
Contact author(s)
maria naya plasencia @ gmail com
jeanphilippe aumasson @ gmail com
History
2010-01-27: last of 5 revisions
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2009/302

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/302,
author = {Maria Naya-Plasencia and Andrea Röck and Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Yann Laigle-Chapuy and Gaëtan Leurent and Willi Meier and Thomas Peyrin},
title = {Cryptanalysis of ESSENCE},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2009/302},
year = {2009},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/302}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/302}
}

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