Replication data for: Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Preimage Attacks against AES Hashing Modes

Hashing modes are ways to convert a block cipher into a hash function, and those with AES as the underlying block cipher are referred to as AES hashing modes. Sasaki in 2011 introduced the first preimage attack against AES hashing modes with the AES block cipher reduced to 7 rounds, by the method of meet-in-the-middle. In his attack, the key schedules are not taken into account, hence the same attack applies to all three versions of AES. In this paper, by introducing neutral bits from key, extra degrees of freedom are gained, which are utilized in two ways, i.e., to reduce the time complexity and to extend the attack to more rounds. As an immediate result, the complexities of 7-round pseudo-preimage attacks are reduced from 2^120 to 2^112, 2^96, and 2^96 for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively. By carefully choosing the neutral bits from key to cancel those from state, the attack is extended to 8 rounds for AES-192 and AES-256 with complexities 2^120 and 2^96. Similar results are obtained for Kiasu-BC, a tweakable block cipher based on AES-128, and interestingly the additional input tweak helps reduce the attack complexities further. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first preimage attacks against 8-round AES hashing modes.