Improved Indifferentiability Security Bound for the JH Mode

Published

March 22, 2012

Author(s)

Dustin Moody, Souradyuti Paul, Daniel C. Smith-Tone

Abstract

The JH hash function is one of the five fi nalists of the ongoing NIST SHA3 hash function competition. Despite several earlier attempts, and years of analysis, the indi fferentiability security bound of the JH mode has so far remained remarkably low, only up to n/3 bits [7]. Using a recent technique introduced by Moody, Paul and Smith-Tone in [23], we are now able to improve the bound of JH to n/2 bits. This means that the JH hash function should be able to resist generic attacks with work-factor less than O(2^n/2). Our rigorous experiments have given ample evidence that the bound could be further improved, possibly up to 2n/3 bits, or more. Theoretical analysis of this experimental result is left as an open problem.

Proceedings Title

None

Conference Dates

March 22-23, 2012

Conference Location

Washington D.C., DC

Conference Title

The Third SHA-3 Candidate Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Hash functions, indifferentiability, SHA-3

Citation

Moody, D. , Paul, S. and Smith-Tone, D. (2012), Improved Indifferentiability Security Bound for the JH Mode, None, Washington D.C., DC, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910702 (Accessed October 14, 2025)