Paper 2026/1050

Guess-and-Determine Rebound Revisited: Full Quantum Collision Attack on AES-256 in DM Hash Mode

Abstract

At CRYPTO 2025, Qin et al. introduced the guess-and-determine (GD) rebound attack, which integrates the guess-and-determine approach by Bouillaguet, Derbez, and Fouque and the rebound attack by Mendel et al. Taking the GD rebound as a building block, this paper introduces several classical and quantum models to convert the semi-free-start (SFS) collision attack or free-start (FS) collision attack into collision attacks on DM hashing mode with AES. As an application, the first full quantum collision attack on AES-256-DM is proposed. Despite numerous round-reduced quantum or classical attacks proposed against the three popular hash modes MMO/MP/DM with AES over the past two decades, this is the first full attack that targets one of the three fundamental security requirements: collision, (2nd) preimage resistance. Our full attack on AES-256-DM improves the best previous attack by Taiyama et al. at ASIACRYPT 2024 by 5 rounds. Besides, some improved results on AES-128-DM and AES-192-DM are also given, which have been verified partially or fully by experiments.