Rebuttal of overtaking VEST

VEST is a set of four stream cipher families targeted to semiconductor applications. All VEST family members support efficient encryption, single pass authenticated encryption, and collision resistant hashing in the one low area module. VEST was submitted by Synaptic Laboratories Ltd. to the ECRYPT NoE eSTREAM project in 2005. Recently, a single digit typographical error was identified in the VEST counter diffuser description. Shortly afterwards Antoine Joux and Jean-René Reinhard [1] published collisions in the counter-diffuser based upon the erroneous description. By extending these collisions across the entire cipher state, they were able to explore various attack scenarios. We prove that the correction of the typographical error removes all the exploitable collisions in the counter diffuser during key and IV loading operations; thereby establishing that the Joux-Reinhard attacks are an artefact of the erroneous description. In March 2007 Joux and Reinhard published their agreement [2], stating that the attacks do not apply anymore. Complete test vectors areand source code is included.