A Distinguisher on PRESENT-Like Permutations with Application to SPONGENT

At Crypto 2015, Blondeau et al. showed a known-key analysis on the full PRESENT lightweight block cipher. Based on some of the best differential distinguishers, they introduced a meet in the middle (MitM) layer to pre-add the differential distinguisher, which extends the number of attacked rounds on PRESENT from 26 rounds to full rounds without reducing differential probability. In this paper, we generalize their method and present a distinguisher on a kind of permutations called PRESENT-like permutations. This generic distinguisher is divided into two phases. The first phase is a truncated differential distinguisher with strong bias, which describes the unbalancedness of the output collision on some fixed bits, given the fixed input in some bits, and we take advantage of the strong relation between truncated differential probability and capacity of multidimensional linear approximation to derive the best differential distinguishers. The second phase is the meet-in-the-middle layer, which is pre-added to the truncated differential to propagate the differential properties as far as possible. Different with Blondeau et al.\u27s work, we extend the MitM layers on a 64-bit internal state to states with any size, and we also give a concrete bound to estimate the attacked rounds of the MitM layer. As an illustration, we apply our technique to all versions of SPONGENT permutations. In the truncated differential phase, as a result we reach one, two or three rounds more than the results shown by the designers. In the meet-in-the-middle phase, we get up to 11 rounds to pre-add to the differential distinguishers. Totally, we improve the previous distinguishers on all versions of SPONGENT permutations by up to 13 rounds

Sieve-in-the-Middle: Improved MITM Attacks (Full Version)

This paper presents a new generic technique, named sieve-in-the-middle, which improves meet-in-the-middle attacks in the sense that it provides an attack on a higher number of rounds. Instead of selecting the key candidates by searching for a collision in an intermediate state which can be computed forwards and backwards, we here look for the existence of valid transitions through some middle sbox. Combining this technique with short bicliques allows to freely add one or two more rounds with the same time complexity. Moreover, when the key size of the cipher is larger than its block size, we show how to build the bicliques by an improved technique which does not require any additional data (on the contrary to previous biclique attacks). These techniques apply to PRESENT, DES, PRINCE and AES, improving the previously known results on these four ciphers. In particular, our attack on PRINCE applies to 8 rounds (out of 12), instead of 6 in the previous cryptanalyses. Some results are also given for theoretically estimating the sieving probability provided by some subsets of the input and output bits of a given sbox

Cryptanalysis of PRESENT-like ciphers with secret S-boxes

Abstract. At Eurocrypt 2001, Biryukov and Shamir investigated the security of AES-like ciphers where the substitutions and affine transformations are all key-dependent and successfully cryptanalysed two and a half rounds. This paper considers PRESENT-like ciphers in a similar manner. We focus on the settings where the S-boxes are key dependent, and repeated for every round. We break one particular variant which was proposed in 2009 with practical complexity in a chosen plaintext/chosen ciphertext scenario. Extrapolating these results suggests that up to 28 rounds of such ciphers can be broken. Furthermore, we outline how our attack strategy can be applied to an extreme case where the S-boxes are chosen uniformly at random for each round and where the bit permutation is secret as well