Abstract. This paper presents a new generic technique, named sieve-in-the-middle, which improves meet-in-the-middle attacks in the sense that it provides an attack on a higher number of rounds. Instead of selecting the key candidates by searching for a collision in an intermediate state which can be computed forwards and backwards, we here look for the existence of valid transitions through some middle sbox. Combining this technique with short bicliques allows to freely add one or two more rounds with the same time complexity. Moreover, when the key size of the cipher is larger than its block size, we show how to build the bicliques by an improved technique which does not require any additional data (on the contrary to previous biclique attacks). These techniques apply to PRESENT, DES, PRINCE and AES, improving the previously known results on these four ciphers. In particular, our attack on PRINCE applies to 8 rounds (out of 12), instead of 6 in the previous cryptanalyses. Some results are also given for theoretically estimating the sieving probability provided by some subsets of the input and output bits of a given sbox.

Abstract. Most cryptographic hash functions are iterated constructions, in which a mode of operation specifies how a compression function or a fixed permutation is applied. The Merkle-Damgård mode of operation is the simplest and more widely deployed mode of operation, yet it suffers from generic second preimage attacks, even when the compression function is ideal.In this paper we focus on provable security against second preimage attacks. Based on the study of several existing constructions, we describe simple properties of modes of operation and show that they are sufficient to allow some form of provable security, first in the random oracle model and then in the standard model. Our security proofs are extremely simple. We show for instance that the claims of the designers of Haifa regarding second preimage resistance are valid.Lastly, we give arguments that proofs of second preimage resistance by a black-box reduction incur an unavoidable security loss.