Survey and Benchmark of Block Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

Cryptographic algorithms play an important role in the security architecture of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Choosing the most storage- and energy-efficient block cipher is essential, due to the facts that these networks are meant to operate without human intervention for a long period of time with little energy supply, and that available storage is scarce on these sensor nodes. However, to our knowledge, no systematic work has been done in this area so far.We construct an evaluation framework in which we first identify the candidates of block ciphers suitable for WSNs, based on existing literature and authoritative recommendations. For evaluating and assessing these candidates, we not only consider the security properties but also the storage- and energy-efficiency of the candidates. Finally, based on the evaluation results, we select the most suitable ciphers for WSNs, namely Skipjack, MISTY1, and Rijndael, depending on the combination of available memory and required security (energy efficiency being implicit). In terms of operation mode, we recommend Output Feedback Mode for pairwise links but Cipher Block Chaining for group communications

Elastic Block Ciphers: Method, Security and Instantiations

We introduce the concept of an elastic block cipher which refers to stretching the supported block size of a block cipher to any length up to twice the original block size while incurring a computational workload that is proportional to the block size. Our method uses the round function of an existing block cipher as a black box and inserts it into a substitution- permutation network. Our method is designed to enable us to form a reduction between the elastic and the original versions of the cipher. Using this reduction, we prove that the elastic version of a cipher is secure against key-recovery attacks if the original cipher is secure against such attacks. We note that while reduction-based proofs of security are a cornerstone of cryptographic analysis, they are typical when complete components are used as sub-components in a larger design. We are not aware of the use of such techniques in the case of concrete block cipher designs. We demonstrate the general applicability of the elastic block cipher method by constructing examples from existing block ciphers: AES, Camellia, MISTY1, and RC6. We compare the performance of the elastic versions to that of the original versions and evaluate the elastic versions using statistical tests measuring the randomness of the ciphertext. We also use our examples to demonstrate the concept of a generic key schedule for block ciphers

Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on Reduced-Round Camellia-192/256

Camellia is one of the widely used block ciphers, which has been selected as an international standard by ISO/IEC. In this paper, we focus on the key-recovery attacks on reduced-round Camellia-192/256 with meet-in-the-middle methods. We utilize multiset and the differential enumeration methods which are popular to analyse AES in the recent to attack Camellia-192/256. We propose a 7-round property for Camellia-192, and achieve a 12-round attack with $2^{180}$ encryptions, $2^{113}$ chosen plaintexts and $2^{130}$ 128-bit memories. Furthermore, we present an 8-round property for Camellia-256, and apply it to break the 13-round Camellia-256 with $2^{232.7}$ encryptions, $2^{113}$ chosen ciphertexts and $2^{227}$ 128-bit memories

Improved Results on Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of Reduced-Round Camellia-192/256

As an international standard adopted by ISO/IEC, the block cipher Camellia has been used in various cryptographic applications. In this paper, we reevaluate the security of Camellia against impossible differential cryptanalysis. Specifically, we propose several 7-round impossible differentials with the $FL/FL^{-1}$ layers. Based on them, we mount impossible differential attacks on 11-round Camellia-192 and 12-round Camellia-256. The data complexities of our attacks on 11-round Camellia-192 and 12-round Camellia-256 are about $2^{120}$ chosen plaintexts and $2^{119.8}$ chosen plaintexts, respectively. The corresponding time complexities are approximately $2^{167.1}$ 11-round encryptions and $2^{220.87}$ 12-round encryptions. As far as we know, our attacks are $2^{16.9}$ times and $2^{19.13}$ times faster than the previously best known ones but have slightly more data

Multidimensional zero-correlation attacks on lightweight block cipher HIGHT: Improved cryptanalysis of an ISO standard

AbstractHIGHT is a block cipher designed in Korea with the involvement of Korea Information Security Agency. It was proposed at CHES 2006 for usage in lightweight applications such as sensor networks and RFID tags. Lately, it has been adopted as ISO standard. Though there is a great deal of cryptanalytic results on HIGHT, its security evaluation against the recent zero-correlation linear attacks is still lacking. At the same time, the Feistel-type structure of HIGHT suggests that it might be susceptible to this type of cryptanalysis. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap.We identify zero-correlation linear approximations over 16 rounds of HIGHT. Based upon those, we attack 27-round HIGHT (round 4 to round 30) with improved time complexity and practical memory requirements. This attack of ours is the best result on HIGHT to date in the classical single-key setting. We also provide the first attack on 26-round HIGHT (round 4 to round 29) with the full whitening key

SoK: Security Evaluation of SBox-Based Block Ciphers

Cryptanalysis of block ciphers is an active and important research area with an extensive volume of literature. For this work, we focus on SBox-based ciphers, as they are widely used and cover a large class of block ciphers. While there have been prior works that have consolidated attacks on block ciphers, they usually focus on describing and listing the attacks. Moreover, the methods for evaluating a cipher\u27s security are often ad hoc, differing from cipher to cipher, as attacks and evaluation techniques are developed along the way. As such, we aim to organise the attack literature, as well as the work on security evaluation. In this work, we present a systematization of cryptanalysis of SBox-based block ciphers focusing on three main areas: (1) Evaluation of block ciphers against standard cryptanalytic attacks; (2) Organisation and relationships between various attacks; (3) Comparison of the evaluation and attacks on existing ciphers