Cryptanalysis of Full RIPEMD-128

In this article we propose a new cryptanalysis method for double-branch hash functions and we apply it on the standard RIPEMD-128, greatly improving over previously known results on this algorithm. Namely, we are able to build a very good differential path by placing one nonlinear differential part in each computation branch of the RIPEMD-128 compression function, but not necessarily in the early steps. In order to handle the low differential probability induced by the nonlinear part located in later steps, we propose a new method for using the available freedom degrees, by attacking each branch separately and then merging them with free message blocks. Overall, we present the first collision attack on the full RIPEMD-128 compression function as well as the first distinguisher on the full RIPEMD-128 hash function. Experiments on reduced number of rounds were conducted, confirming our reasoning and complexity analysis. Our results show that 16-year-old RIPEMD-128, one of the last unbroken primitives belonging to the MD-SHA family, might not be as secure as originally thought.