[Resource Topic] 2025/792: A Scrutiny of the Security of AES-based Hashing and One-way Functions

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Title:
A Scrutiny of the Security of AES-based Hashing and One-way Functions

Authors: Shiyao Chen, Jian Guo, Eik List, Danping Shi, Tianyu Zhang

Abstract:

AES has cemented its position as the primary symmetric-key primitive for a wide range of cryptographic applications, which motivates the analysis on the concrete security of AES’s instantiations in practice, for instance, the collision resistance of AES-based hashing, the key commitment security of AES-based authenticated encryption schemes, and the one-wayness of AES-based one-way functions in ZK and MPC protocols. In this work, we introduce single-color initial structures into meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, a systematic technique to identify attack trails that enable efficient neutral word generation and low-memory attacks. As a result, we have attained: (1) the first classical one-block collision attack on 7-round AES-MMO/MP, marking the first advancement in attack rounds for more than a decade and matching the attack rounds in the quantum setting; (2) the first one-block collision attack on 4-round AES-128-DM, which bridges the gap in Taiyama et al.'s claim at Asiacrypt 2024 from an MITM perspective; (3) the first improvement in single known plaintext key recovery attack on 5-round AES-128 in over a decade; (4) comprehensive results on the security margin of Rijndael-192 and Rijndael-256 in multiple instantiations. These breakthroughs deepen our understanding of AES-like structure, and contribute as a scrutiny of the security of AES-based instantiations.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/792

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