Distinguishers on Double-Branch Compression Function and Applications to Round-Reduced RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160

Abstract

This paper presents differential-based distinguishers against double-branch compression functions and applies them to ISO standard hash functions RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160. A double-branch compression function computes two branch functions to update a chaining variable and then merges their outputs. For such a compression function, we observe that second-order differential paths will be constructed by finding a sub-path in each branch independently. This leads to 4-sum attacks on 47 steps (out of 64 steps) of RIPEMD-128 and 40 steps (out of 80 steps) of RIPEMD-160. Then new properties called a (partial) 2-dimension sum and a q-multi-second-order collision are considered. The partial 2-dimension sum is generated on 48 steps of RIPEMD-128 and 42 steps of RIPEMD-160, with complexities of 2³⁵ and 2³⁶, respectively. Theoretically, the 2-dimension sum is generated faster than the brute force attack up to 52 steps of RIPEMD-128 and 51 steps of RIPEMD-160, with complexities of 2¹⁰¹ and 2¹⁵⁸, respectively. The results on RIPEMD-128 can also be viewed as q-multi-second-order collision attacks. The practical attacks have been implemented and examples are presented. We stress that our results do not impact to the security of full RIPEMD-128 and RIPEMD-160 hash functions.