Practical (Second) Preimage Attacks on the TCS_SHA-3 Family of Cryptographic Hash Functions

TCS_SHA-3 is a family of four cryptographic hash functions that are covered by a United States patent (US 2009/0262925). The digest sizes are 224, 256, 384 and 512 bits. The hash functions use bijective functions in place of the standard compression functions. In this paper we describe first and second preimage attacks on the full hash functions. The second preimage attack requires negligible time and the first preimage attack requires $O(2^{36})$ time. In addition to these attacks, we also present a negligible time second preimage attack on a strengthened variant of the TCS_SHA-3. All the attacks have negligible memory requirements. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior cryptanalysis of any member of the TCS_SHA-3 family in the literature.