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Moving the frontier one step at a time.
SHA-256 is not broken, but its security margin lost 1 more round this year:
Last week I found a collision attack on reduced 39-round that improves prior art by over 30 bits and the first differential attack on that round better than generic search on @yukonresearch Hashsmash board.
The attack rests on the same method as prior art ePrint 2026/1120 with new insights that first 2 state words could remain free, allowing a critical condition at step 16 rebuilt as a claw-search problem rather than a probabilistic filter. Took days of watching SAT logs, burning cores and arguing with Claude on what's possible to get a result close to generic search.
Since my initial submission, other hashsmash participants sraiw, @cyberaxe, @privacymage, @lamb356_ and @geeknik pushed it down by over 6.5 bits, currently estimated at 118.15 bits. The tree of submissions is hard to follow, so I put the construction, insights and numbers into a blog and am working on detailed technical report.
It's fascinating to see an initial structural observation develop into an improvement in the reduced-round collision frontier within days. AI is now a real aid in cryptanalysis and open collaboration speeds it up.View quoted post on X
