On the Internal Structure of Alpha-MAC

Abstract. ALPHA-MAC is a MAC function which uses the building blocks of AES. This paper studies the internal structure of this new design. First, we provide a method to find second preimages based on the assumption that a key or an intermediate value is known. The proposed searching algorithm exploits the algebraic properties of the underlying block cipher and needs to solve eight groups of linear functions to find a second preimage. Second, we show that our idea can also be used to find internal collisions under the same assumption. We do not make any claims that those findings in any way endanger the security of this MAC function. Our contribution is showing how algebraic properties of AES can be used for analysis of this MAC function.