This paper applies generalized birthday attacks to the FSB compression function, and shows how to adapt the attacks so that they run in far less memory. In particular, this paper presents details of a parallel implementation attacking FSB48, a scaled-down version of FSB proposed by the FSB submitters. The implementation runs on a cluster of 8 PCs, each with only 8GB of RAM and 700GB of disk. This situation is very interesting for estimating the security of systems against distributed attacks using contributed off-the-shelf PCs.
Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Ruben Niederhage