This paper presents the first non-trivial collision attack on the double-block-length compression function presented at FSE 2006 instantiated with round-reduced AES-256: f0(h0||h1,M)||f1(h0||h1,M) such that f0(h0||h1, M) = Eh1||M(h0)⊕h0 , f1(h0||h1,M) = Eh1||M(h0⊕c)⊕h0⊕c , where || represents concatenation, E is AES-256 and c is a 16-byte non-zero constant. The proposed attack is a free-start collision attack using the rebound attack proposed by Mendel et al. The success of the proposed attack largely depends on the configuration of the constant c: the number of its non-zero bytes and their positions. For the instantiation with AES-256 reduced from 14 rounds to 8 rounds, it is effective if the constant c has at most four non-zero bytes at some specific positions, and the time complexity is 264 or 296. For the instantiation with AES-256 reduced to 9 rounds, it is effective if the constant c has four non-zero bytes at some specific positions, and the time complexity is 2120. The space complexity is negligible in both cases.

In this article, we discuss the security of double-block-length (DBL) hash functions against the free-start collision attack. We focus on the DBL hash functions composed of compression functions of the form F(x) = (f(x), f(p(x))), where f is a smaller compression function and p is a permutation. We first show, in the random oracle model, that a significantly good upper bound can be obtained on the success probability of the free-start collision attack with sufficient conditions on p and the set of initial values. We also show that a similar upper bound can be obtained in the ideal cipher model if f is composed of a block cipher.