Whirlpool (hash function)

In computer science and cryptography, Whirlpool (sometimes styled WHIRLPOOL) is a cryptographic hash function. It was designed by Vincent Rijmen (co-creator of the Advanced Encryption Standard) and Paulo S. L. M. Barreto, who first described it in 2000.

The hash has been recommended by the NESSIE project. It has also been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as part of the joint ISO/IEC 10118-3 international standard.

Whirlpool is a hash designed after the Square block cipher, and is considered to be in that family of block cipher functions.

Whirlpool is a Miyaguchi-Preneel construction based on a substantially modified Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Whirlpool takes a message of any length less than 2²⁵⁶ bits and returns a 512-bit message digest.^[3]

The authors have declared that

"WHIRLPOOL is not (and will never be) patented. It may be used free of charge for any purpose."^[2]

The original Whirlpool will be called Whirlpool-0, the first revision of Whirlpool will be called Whirlpool-T and the latest version will be called Whirlpool in the following test vectors.

• In the first revision in 2001, the S-box was changed from a randomly generated one with good cryptographic properties to one which has better cryptographic properties and is easier to implement in hardware.
• In the second revision (2003), a flaw in the diffusion matrix was found that lowered the estimated security of the algorithm below its potential.^[4] Changing the 8x8 rotating matrix constants from (1, 1, 3, 1, 5, 8, 9, 5) to (1, 1, 4, 1, 8, 5, 2, 9) solved this issue.

The Whirlpool hash function is a Merkle–Damgård construction based on an AES-like block cipher W in Miyaguchi–Preneel mode.^[2]

The block cipher W consists of an 8×8 state matrix ${\displaystyle S}$ of bytes, for a total of 512 bits.

The encryption process consists of updating the state with four round functions over 10 rounds. The four round functions are SubBytes (SB), ShiftColumns (SC), MixRows (MR) and AddRoundKey (AK). During each round the new state is computed as ${\displaystyle S=AK\circ MR\circ SC\circ SB(S)}$.

The SubBytes operation applies a non-linear permutation (the S-box) to each byte of the state independently. The 8-bit S-box is composed of 3 smaller 4-bit S-boxes.

The ShiftColumns operation cyclically shifts each byte in each column of the state. Column j has its bytes shifted downwards by j positions.

The MixRows operation is a right-multiplication of each row by an 8×8 matrix over ${\displaystyle GF({2^{8}})}$. The matrix is chosen such that the branch number (an important property when looking at resistance to differential cryptanalysis) is 9, which is maximal.

The AddRoundKey operation uses bitwise xor to add a key calculated by the key schedule to the current state. The key schedule is identical to the encryption itself, except the AddRoundKey function is replaced by an AddRoundConstant function that adds a predetermined constant in each round.

The Whirlpool algorithm has undergone two revisions since its original 2000 specification.

People incorporating Whirlpool will most likely use the most recent revision of Whirlpool; while there are no known security weaknesses in earlier versions of Whirlpool, the most recent revision has better hardware implementation efficiency characteristics, and is also likely to be more secure. As mentioned earlier, it is also the version adopted in the ISO/IEC 10118-3 international standard.

The 512-bit (64-byte) Whirlpool hashes (also termed message digests) are typically represented as 128-digit hexadecimal numbers.
The following demonstrates a 43-byte ASCII input (not including quotes) and the corresponding Whirlpool hashes:

 4F8F5CB531E3D49A61CF417CD133792CCFA501FD8DA53EE368FED20E5FE0248C
 3A0B64F98A6533CEE1DA614C3A8DDEC791FF05FEE6D971D57C1348320F4EB42D

 3CCF8252D8BBB258460D9AA999C06EE38E67CB546CFFCF48E91F700F6FC7C183
 AC8CC3D3096DD30A35B01F4620A1E3A20D79CD5168544D9E1B7CDF49970E87F1

 B97DE512E91E3828B40D2B0FDCE9CEB3C4A71F9BEA8D88E75C4FA854DF36725F
 D2B52EB6544EDCACD6F8BEDDFEA403CB55AE31F03AD62A5EF54E42EE82C3FB35

The authors provide reference implementations of the Whirlpool algorithm, including a version written in C and a version written in Java.^[2] These reference implementations have been released into the public domain.^[2]

Research on the security analysis of the Whirlpool function however, has revealed that on average, the introduction of 8 random faults is sufficient to compromise the 512-bit Whirlpool hash message being processed and the secret key of HMAC-Whirlpool within the context of Cloud of Things (CoTs). This emphasizes the need for increased security measures in its implementation.^[5]

Two of the first widely used mainstream cryptographic programs that started using Whirlpool were FreeOTFE, followed by TrueCrypt in 2005.^{[citation needed]}

VeraCrypt (a fork of TrueCrypt) included Whirlpool (the final version) as one of its supported hash algorithms.^[6]

• Digital timestamping

• The WHIRLPOOL Hash Function at the Wayback Machine (archived 2017-11-29)
• Jacksum on SourceForge, a Java implementation of all three revisions of Whirlpool
• whirlpool on GitHub – An open source Go implementation of the latest revision of Whirlpool
• A Matlab Implementation of the Whirlpool Hashing Function
• RHash, an open source command-line tool, which can calculate and verify Whirlpool hash.
• Perl Whirlpool module at CPAN
• Digest module implementing the Whirlpool hashing algorithm in Ruby
• Ironclad a Common Lisp cryptography package containing a Whirlpool implementation
• The ISO/IEC 10118-3:2004 standard
• Test vectors for the Whirlpool hash from the NESSIE project
• Managed C# implementation
• Python Whirlpool module