FORK-256

Abstract: We show that a 2112.9 collision attack exists against the FORK-256 Hash Function. The attack is surprisingly simple compared to existing published FORK-256 cryptanalysis work, yet is the best known result against the new, tweaked version of the hash. The attack is based on "splitting" the message schedule and compression function into two halves in a meet-in-the-middle attack. This in turn reduces the space of possible hash function results, which leads to significantly faster collision search. The attack strategy is also applicable to the original version of FORK-256 published in FSE 2006.

Abstract: In this paper we present a cryptanalysis of a new 256-bit hash function, FORK-256, proposed by Hong et al. at FSE 2006. This cryptanalysis is based on some unexpected differentials existing for the step transformation. We show their possible uses in different attack scenarios by giving a 1-bit (resp. 2-bit) near collision attack against the full compression function of FORK-256 running with complexity of 2125 (resp. 2120) and with negligible memory, and by exhibiting a 22-bit near pseudo-collision. We also show that we can find collisions for the full compression function with a small amount of memory with complexity not exceeding 2126.6 hash evaluations. We further show how to reduce this complexity to 2109.6 hash computations by using 273 memory words. Finally, we show that this attack can be extended with no additional cost to find collisions for the full hash function, i.e. with the predefined IV.

Abstract: We show that a 2 collision attack exists against the FORK-256 Hash Function. The attack is surprisingly simple compared to existing published FORK-256 cryptanalysis work, yet is the best known result against the new, tweaked version of the hash. The attack is based on “splitting” the message schedule and compression function into two halves in a meet-in-the-middle attack. This in turn reduces the space of possible hash function results, which leads to significantly faster collision search. The attack strategy is also applicable to the original version of FORK-256 published in FSE 2006.

Abstract: FORK-256 is a hash function presented at FSE 2006. Whereas SHA-like designs process messages in one stream, FORK-256 uses four parallel streams for hashing. In this article, we present the first cryptanalytic results on this design strategy. First, we study a linearized variant of FORK-256, and show several unusual properties of this linearized variant. We also explain why the linearized model can not be used to mount attacks similar to the recent attacks by Wang et al. on SHA-like hash functions. Second, we show how collision attacks, exploiting the non-bijectiveness of the nonlinear functions of FORK-256, can be mounted on reduced variants of FORK-256. We show an efficient attack on FORK-256 reduced to 2 streams and present actual colliding pairs. We expect that our attack can also be extended to FORK-256 reduced to 3 streams. For the moment our approach does not appear to be applicable to the full FORK-256 hash function.