Tan Kah Kee Science Award in Information Sciences 2006
Wang Xiaoyun, cryptographer，was born on 16 August 1966 in ZhuCheng, Shandong Province. She received the PH. D from Shandong University in 1993, and is now the professor at the School of Mathematics and System Sciences in Shandong University and C. N. Yang Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Tsinghua University.
Wang is mainly involved in research on the cryptanalysis and the design of cryptographic algorithms, and since 1996, Wang focus on the research of hash functions and has broken two world widely used hash functions MD5 and SHA-1 successively which shock the world. She has published about 20 papers, of which, 7 papers on the cryptanalysis of the existing hash functions were published in recent two years. In 2005, her papers were cited 136 times, and 43 times by SCI publications.
Attack on Hash Function
Abstract
Xiaoyun Wang proposed an innovative and creative cryptanalysis theory on Hash Function and invented a series of techniques to find collisions of hash functions. The main theory and techniques are as follows: Wang introduced Bit Tracing Method to search for collision paths of most hash functions efficiently, and fulfilled Message Modification which improves the attack efficiency greatly. Wang also constructed an idea to combine near-collisions into collisions which is successfully utilized to break MD5 and SHA-1. Furthermore, in SHA-1 break, Wang converted an impossible differential of SHA-1 in first round into another complicated possible differential which results in possible differential path to break SHA-1. In addition, Wang explored another kind of second pre-image attack on hash function MD4 which can be utilized to analyze MACs.
