Preimage and Collision Attacks on MD2

This paper contains several attacks on the hash function MD2 which has a hash code size of 128 bits. At Asiacrypt 2004 Muller presents the first known preimage attack on MD2. The time complexity of the attack is about 2104 and the preimages consist always of 128 blocks. We present a preimage attack of complexity about 297 with the further advantage that the preimages are of variable lengths. Moreover we are always able to find many preimages for one given hash value. Also we introduce many new collisions for the MD2 compression function, which lead to the first known (pseudo) collisions for the full MD2 (including the checksum), but where the initial values differ. Finally we present a pseudo preimage attack of complexity 295 but where the preimages can have any desired lengths.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FSE
• Authors: Lars R. Knudsen, John Erik Mathiassen
• Keywords: Cryptography, FSE 2005, Hash Code Size, Preimage Attack, first Known Preimage