Revisiting the Indifferentiability of PGV Hash Functions

In this paper, first we point out some flaws in the existing indifferentiability simulations of the pf-MD and the NMAC constructions, and provide new differentiable attacks on the hash functions based these schemes. Afterthat, the indifferentiability of the 20 collision resistant PGV hash functions, which are padded under the pf-MD, the NMAC/HMAC and the chop-MD constructions, are reconsidered. Moreover, we disclose that there exist 4 PGV schemes can be differentiable from a random oracle with the pf-MD among 16 indifferentiable PGV schemes proven by Chang et al. Finally, new indifferentiability simulations are provided for 20 collision-resistant PGV schemes. The simulations exploit that 20 collision-resistant PGV hash functions, which implemented with the NMAC/HMAC and the chop-MD, are indifferentiable from a random oracle. Our result implies that same compression functions under MD variants might have the same security bound with respect to the collision resistance, but quite different in the view of indifferentiability.