The CodingTool Library
Tomislav Nad · 2009
It has been shown in the past that tools from coding theory are very powerful in the cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives. For instance they can be used to find differential characteristics with low Hamming weight like in the cryptanalysis of SHA-0 [3], SHA-1 [7], EnRUPT [4], CubeHash [1] or SIMD [6]. As observed by Rijmen and Oswald [8], all differential characteristics for a linearized hash function can be seen as the code words of a linear code. Algorithms for finding low Hamming weight code words in a linear code work well for finding linear differential characteristics with low Hamming weight. Our contribution is a library which should make the cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives a little easier. The library implements a search algorithm, interfaces, data structures and several other useful functionalities. The abstraction level is high, so that a cryptanalyst does not have to care about complicated implementation details.