Christian Rechberger receives Test Of Time Award

On March 26th, our colleague Christian received the TEST OF TIME award at @fse2024 in Leuven for the paper “The rebound attack: Cryptanalysis of reduced Whirlpool and Grøstl”.

The FSE Test-of-Time Award is given yearly. An award will be given in year X to honor a paper published at FSE/ToSC in year X-15 which has had a lasting impact on the field.

The paper appeared at the beginning of the NIST SHA-3 competition in 2009 and caught the community by surprise in the sense that quite a number of candidates became victims of the ideas in this paper. It is still relevant today as the rebound attack became a standard tool in the toolbox of cryptanalysts, and new hash function designs, such as Ascon-hash, Poseidon, Monolith or even newer ones currently in development, need to be vetted against this attack vector.

Paper authors: Florian Mendel, Christian Rechberger, Martin Schläffer, Søren Thomsen