Cryptanalysis of Luffa v2 Components

We develop a number of techniques for the cryptanalysis of the SHA-3 candidate Luffa, and apply them to various Luffa components. These techniques include a new variant of the rebound approach taking into account the specifics of Luffa. The main improvements include the construction of good truncated differential paths, the search for differences using multiple inbound phases and a fast final solution search via linear systems. Using these techniques, we are able to construct nontrivial semi-free-start collisions for 7 (out of 8 rounds) of Luffa-256 with a complexity of 2 in time and 2 in memory. This is the first analysis of a Luffa component other that the permutation of Luffa v1. Additionally, we provide new and more efficient distinguishers also for the full permutation of Luffa v2. For this permutation distinguisher, we use a new model which applies first a short test on all samples and then a longer test on a smaller subset of the inputs. We demonstrate that a set of right pairs for the given differential path can be found significantly faster than for a random permutation.