Abstract. This paper studies the security of SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512 against collision attacks and provides some insight into the security properties of the basic building blocks of the structure. It is concluded that neither Chabaud and Joux's attack, nor Dobbertin-style attacks apply. Differential and linear attacks also don't apply on the underlying structure. However we show that slightly simplified versions of the hash functions are surprisingly weak : whenever symmetric constants and initialization values are used throughout the computations, and modular additions are replaced by exclusive or operations, symmetric messages hash to symmetric digests. Therefore the complexity of collision search on these modified hash functions potentially becomes as low as one wishes.

This paper discusses key recovery and universal forgery attacks on several MAC algorithms based on universal hash functions. The attacks use a substantial number of verification queries but eventually allow for universal forgeries instead of existential or multiple forgeries. This means that the security of the algorithms completely collapses once a few forgeries are found. Some of these attacks start off by exploiting a weak key property, but turn out to become full-fledged divide and conquer attacks because of the specific structure of the universal hash functions considered. Partial information on a secret key can be exploited too, in the sense that it renders some key recovery attacks practical as soon as a few key bits are known. These results show that while universal hash functions offer provable security, high speeds and parallelism, their simple combinatorial properties make them less robust than conventional message authentication primitives.

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