Under this project, the working principles and methods the BLAKE-256 and BLAKE2s hash functions were studied and analysed. Later, preimage attacks were mounted on the round-reduced(i.e. 1.5 and 2 rounds) versions of BLAKE-256 and BLAKE2s. Both the above-mentioned hash functions produce 256-bit hash values. BLAKE was one of the five finalists for the SHA-III standard in the NIST's hash function competition. BLAKE2 was later introduced as a faster successor of BLAKE. In this project, working methods of both the hash functions is explained with implementations in the C programming language.

• Differential attack on 6 rounds of DES block cipher: Repository.
• Analysis & preimage attack (1.5 and 2 rounds) of BLAKE-256: Repository.
• Analysis & preimage attack (1.5 and 2 rounds) of BLAKE2s: Repository.
• Proposed an improved attack on 2 rounds of BLAKE-256/BLAKE2s (This repository).

• Ajay Choudhury (@ajaycc17)

• Dr Shashank Singh (IISER Bhopal)

• Ronald L. Rivest. The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm. RFC 1321, April 1992
• Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, Raphael C.-W. Phan: Sha-3 proposal blake. Submission to NIST (2008)
• Ji, L., Liangyu, X.: Attacks on round-reduced BLAKE. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2009/238 (2009)
• Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Jian Guo, Simon Knellwolf, Krystian Matusiewicz, and Willi Meier: Differential and invertibility properties of BLAKE (full version). Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2010/043 (2010)
• Aumasson, J.P., Samuel N., Z. Wilcox-O'Hearn, and Christian W.: BLAKE2: simpler, smaller, fast as MD5.Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2013/322 (2013)
• Jian Guo and Pierre Karpman and Ivica Nikolic and Lei Wang and Shuang Wu: Analysis of BLAKE2. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2013/467 (2013)