A fast attack on the MD4 hash function

Author

Kasselman, P.R.

Author_Institution

Ciphertec, Menlo Park, CA, USA

fYear

1997

fDate

9-10 Sep 1997

Firstpage

147

Lastpage

150

Abstract

Cryptographic hash functions are important cryptographic primitives and are used extensively in cryptographic applications. One such family of hash functions is the MD4 family. This family includes hash functions such as MD5, SHA-1 and RIPEMD-160. In 1995 an attack on the full compress function of MD4 was presented by Dobbertin. This paper builds on the work presented by Dobbertin. The attack of Dobbertin consists out of two components. The first component requires that a solution to a set of nonlinear equations be found. This paper presents an algorithm which reduces the number of trials required for finding a solution to these nonlinear equations. This algorithm is approximately 64 times faster than the technique proposed by Dobbertin. This implies a significant reduction in the effort required for finding collisions for MD4

Keywords

cryptography; nonlinear equations; MD4 hash function; MD5; RIPEMD-160; SHA-1; algorithm; collisions; compress function; cryptographic hash functions; cryptographic primitives; fast attack; nonlinear equations solution; trials; Bismuth; Cryptography; Electronic commerce; Nonlinear equations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communications and Signal Processing, 1997. COMSIG '97., Proceedings of the 1997 South African Symposium on

Conference_Location

Grahamstown

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4173-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/COMSIG.1997.629999

Filename

629999