ESSENCE

1 The algorithm

• Authors: Jason Worth Martin
• Website: http://www.math.jmu.edu/~martin/essence/
• NIST submission package: ESSENCE.zip

Jason Worth Martin - ESSENCE: A Candidate Hashing Algorithm for the NIST Competition

,2008

http://www.math.jmu.edu/~martin/essence/Supporting_Documentation/essence_NIST.pdf
Bibtex

Author : Jason Worth Martin
Title : ESSENCE: A Candidate Hashing Algorithm for the NIST Competition
In : -
Address :
Date : 2008

Jason Worth Martin - ESSENCE: A Family of Cryptographic Hashing Algorithms

,2008

http://www.math.jmu.edu/~martin/essence/Supporting_Documentation/essence_compression.pdf
Bibtex

Author : Jason Worth Martin
Title : ESSENCE: A Family of Cryptographic Hashing Algorithms
In : -
Address :
Date : 2008

Jason Worth Martin - ESSENCE: Errata

,2008

http://www.math.jmu.edu/~martin/essence/Supporting_Documentation/essence_errata.pdf
Bibtex

Author : Jason Worth Martin
Title : ESSENCE: Errata
In : -
Address :
Date : 2008

2 Cryptanalysis

Type of Analysis	Hash Function Part	Hash Size (n)	Parameters/Variants	Compression Function Calls	Memory Requirements	Reference
observation	compression function	all		-	-	Mouha,Thomsen,Turan
observation	compression function	all		-	-	Mouha et al.
key recovery	block cipher	256	14 rounds	2225	-	Mouha et al.
key recovery	block cipher	512	14 rounds	2450	-	Mouha et al.
pseudo-collision	hash	512	31 rounds	2254.6	-	Mouha et al.
collision	hash	224/256		267.4	-	Naya-Plasencia et al.
collision	hash	384/512		2134.7	-	Naya-Plasencia et al.

A description of this table is given here.

Nicky Mouha, Søren S. Thomsen, Meltem Sönmez Turan - Observations of non-randomness in the ESSENCE compression function

,2009

http://www.mat.dtu.dk/people/S.Thomsen/essence/Essence-obs.pdf
Bibtex

Author : Nicky Mouha, Søren S. Thomsen, Meltem Sönmez Turan
Title : Observations of non-randomness in the ESSENCE compression function
In : -
Address :
Date : 2009

Nicky Mouha, Gautham Sekar, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Thomas Peyrin, Søren S. Thomsen, Meltem Sönmez Turan, Bart Preneel - Cryptanalysis of the ESSENCE Family of Hash Functions

,2009

http://www.nickymouha.be/papers/Essence-MouhaSekar.pdf
Bibtex

Author : Nicky Mouha, Gautham Sekar, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Thomas Peyrin, Søren S. Thomsen, Meltem Sönmez Turan, Bart Preneel
Title : Cryptanalysis of the ESSENCE Family of Hash Functions
In : -
Address :
Date : 2009

<bibtex> @misc{essenceNRALLMP09,

   author = {María Naya-Plasencia and Andrea Röck and Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Yann Laigle-Chapuy and Gaëtan Leurent and Willi Meier and Thomas Peyrin},
   title = {Cryptanalysis of ESSENCE},
   howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2009/302},
   year = {2009},
   url = {http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/302.pdf},
   note = {\url{http://eprint.iacr.org/}},
   abstract = {ESSENCE is a hash function submitted to the NIST Hash Competition that stands out as a hardware-friendly and highly parallelizable design, and that has thus far remained unbroken. Preliminary analysis in its documentation argues that it resists standard differential cryptanalysis. This paper disproves this claim, showing that advanced techniques can be used to significantly reduce the cost of such attacks: using a manually found differential path and a nontrivial search algorithm, we obtain shortcut collision attacks on the full ESSENCE-256 and ESSENCE-512, with respective complexities $2^{67.4}$ and $2^{134.7}$. As an aside, we show how to use these attacks for forging valid message/MAC pairs for HMAC-ESSENCE-256 and HMAC-ESSENCE-512, essentially at the same cost as a collision.},

}