Efficient Hash Collision Search Strategies on SpecialPurpose Hardware.pdfVIP

Efficient Hash Collision Search Strategies on Special-Purpose Hardware Tim G¨uneysu, Christof Paar, Sven Sch¨age Horst G¨ortz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany {gueneysu,cpaar}@crypto.rub.de, sven.schaege@nds.rub.de Abstract Hash functions play an important role in various cryptographic applications. Modern cryp- tography relies on a few but supposedly well analyzed hash functions, most of which are part of the so called MD4-family. This work shows whether it is possible, using special-purpose hardware, to significantly speedup collision search for MD4-family hash functions. A thorough analysis of the computational requirements of MD4-family hash functions and their correspond- ing collision attacks reveals that a microprocessor based architecture is best suited for the implementation of collision search algorithms. Consequently, we designed and implemented a general-purpose microprocessor for MD4-family hash-functions with minimal area requirements and, based on this, a full collision search integrated circuit. Comparing the performance charac- teristics of both ASICs with standard PC processors and networks, it turns out that our design, massively parallelized, is nearly four times more cost-efficient than parallelized standard PCs. We believe that there is much room for further improvements left. Keywords. Hash functions, special-purpose hardware, crypto attacks. 1 Introduction In February 2005 Wang et al. presented a new attack method against the popular Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1). It reduces the computational attack complexity to find a collision from O(280 ) to approximately O(269 ) [10] leading to the announcement that SHA-1 has been broken in theory. Soon it was further improved to O(263 )