International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a framework for speeding up the search for preimages of candidate one-way functions based on highly biased differential-linear distinguishers. It is naturally applicable to preimage attacks on hash functions. Further, a variant of this framework applied to keyed functions leads to accelerated key-recovery attacks. Interestingly, our technique is able to exploit related-key differential-linear distinguishers in the single-key model without querying the target encryption oracle with unknown but related keys. This is in essence similar to how we speed up the key search based on the well known complementation property of DES, which calls for caution from the designers in building primitives meant to be secure in the single-key setting without a thorough cryptanalysis in the related-key model. We apply the method to sponge-based hash function Ascon-HASH, XOFs XOEsch/Ascon-XOF and AEAD Schwaemm, etc. Accelerated preimage or key-recovery attacks are obtained. Note that all the differential-linear distinguishers employed in this work are highly biased and thus can be experimentally verified.