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Re: truncation




I repeat briefly the main points of my post of February 16th:

 - MD5 is probably not a strong cryptographic primitive. 

 - The most dangerous attacks on HMAC constructions based on MD5
   seem to be the _key recovery_ attacks. 
   These attacks become more difficult if truncation is applied. 
   (just as DES in 16-bit CFB is harder to break than DES). 
   Forgery attacks seem to be less realistic, and also not as
   dangerous as key recovery attacks.

Bart Preneel
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On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Hilarie Orman wrote:

> MD5 is already borderline, and the removal of that much of the output
> seems way too risky, an invitation to doom.  If you only have to match
> 96 bits, the possibility of taking one message+HMAC and turning it
> into a legal message'+HMAC, even without knowing the key, seems not
> impossible, given that only 96 bits have to match.  In fact, it seems
> to me that you might be able to use such a technique to test for
> individual key bits, using the receiver as a verifier.
> 
> Hilarie
> 



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