Paper 2010/198

The Rebound Attack and Subspace Distinguishers: Application to Whirlpool

Mario Lamberger and Florian Mendel and Christian Rechberger and Vincent Rijmen and Martin Schläffer

Abstract

We introduce the rebound attack as a variant of differential cryptanalysis on hash functions and apply it to the hash function Whirlpool, standardized by ISO/IEC. We give attacks on reduced variants of the Whirlpool hash function and the Whirlpool compression function. Next, we introduce the subspace problems as generalizations of near-collision resistance. Finally, we present distinguishers based on the rebound attack, that apply to the full compression function of Whirlpool and the underlying block cipher $W$.