Cube Test Analysis of the Statistical Behavior of CubeHash and Skein

This work analyzes the statistical properties of the SHA-3 candidate cryptographic hash algorithms CubeHash and Skein to try to find nonrandom behavior. Cube tests were used to probe each algorithm’s internal polynomial structure for a large number of choices of the polynomial input variables. The cube test data were calculated on a 40-core hybrid SMP cluster parallel computer. The cube test data were subjected to three statistical tests: balance, independence, and off-by-one. Although isolated statistical test failures were observed, the balance and off-by-one tests did not find nonrandom behavior overall in either CubeHash or Skein. However, the independence test did find nonrandom behavior overall in both CubeHash and Skein.