A Comprehensive Survey on the Implementations, Attacks, and Countermeasures of the Current NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standard

This survey is the first work on the current standard for lightweight cryptography, standardized in 2023. Lightweight cryptography plays a vital role in securing resource-constrained embedded systems such as deeply-embedded systems (implantable and wearable medical devices, smart fabrics, smart homes, and the like), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensor networks, and privacy-constrained usage models. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process for lightweight cryptography and after a relatively-long multi-year effort, eventually, in Feb. 2023, the competition ended with ASCON as the winner. This lightweight cryptographic standard will be used in deeply-embedded architectures to provide security through confidentiality and integrity/authentication (the dual of the legacy AES-GCM block cipher which is the NIST standard for symmetric key cryptography). ASCON's lightweight design utilizes a 320-bit permutation which is bit-sliced into five 64-bit register words, providing 128-bit level security. This work summarizes the different implementations of ASCON on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and ASIC hardware platforms on the basis of area, power, throughput, energy, and efficiency overheads. The presented work also reviews various differential and side-channel analysis attacks (SCAs) performed across variants of ASCON cipher suite in terms of algebraic, cube/cube-like, forgery, fault injection, and power analysis attacks as well as the countermeasures for these attacks. We also provide our insights and visions throughout this survey to provide new future directions in different domains. This survey is the first one in its kind and a step forward towards scrutinizing the advantages and future directions of the NIST lightweight cryptography standard introduced in 2023

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TÜBİTAK EEEAG Proje01.10.201

A Better Key Schedule for DES-like Ciphers

Several DES-like ciphers aren't utilizing their full potential strength, because of the short key and linear or otherwise easily tractable algorithms they use to generate their key schedules. Using DES as example, we show a way to generate round subkeys to increase the cipher strength substantially by making relations between the round subkeys practically intractable

Improved Integral and Zero-correlation Linear Cryptanalysis of Reduced-round CLEFIA Block Cipher

CLEFIA is a block cipher developed by Sony Corporation in 2007. It is a recommended cipher of CRYPTREC, and has been adopted as ISO/IEC international standard in lightweight cryptography. In this paper, some new 9-round zero-correlation linear distinguishers of CLEFIA are constructed with the input masks and output masks being independent, which allow multiple zero-correlation linear attacks on 14/15-rounds CLEAIA-192/256 with the partial sum technique. Furthermore, the relations between integral distinguishers and zero-correlation linear approximations are improved, and some new integral distinguishers over 9-round are deduced from zero-correlation linear approximations. By using these integral distinguishers and the partial sum technique, the previous integral results on CLEFIA are improved. The two results have either one more rounds or lower time complexity than previous attack results by means of integral and zero-correlation linear cryptanalysis

Cryptanalysis of McEliece Cryptosystem Based on Algebraic Geometry Codes and their subcodes

We give polynomial time attacks on the McEliece public key cryptosystem based either on algebraic geometry (AG) codes or on small codimensional subcodes of AG codes. These attacks consist in the blind reconstruction either of an Error Correcting Pair (ECP), or an Error Correcting Array (ECA) from the single data of an arbitrary generator matrix of a code. An ECP provides a decoding algorithm that corrects up to $\frac{d^*-1-g}{2}$ errors, where $d^*$ denotes the designed distance and $g$ denotes the genus of the corresponding curve, while with an ECA the decoding algorithm corrects up to $\frac{d^*-1}{2}$ errors. Roughly speaking, for a public code of length $n$ over $\mathbb F_q$, these attacks run in $O(n^4\log (n))$ operations in $\mathbb F_q$ for the reconstruction of an ECP and $O(n^5)$ operations for the reconstruction of an ECA. A probabilistic shortcut allows to reduce the complexities respectively to $O(n^{3+\varepsilon} \log (n))$ and $O(n^{4+\varepsilon})$. Compared to the previous known attack due to Faure and Minder, our attack is efficient on codes from curves of arbitrary genus. Furthermore, we investigate how far these methods apply to subcodes of AG codes.Comment: A part of the material of this article has been published at the conferences ISIT 2014 with title "A polynomial time attack against AG code based PKC" and 4ICMCTA with title "Crypt. of PKC that use subcodes of AG codes". This long version includes detailed proofs and new results: the proceedings articles only considered the reconstruction of ECP while we discuss here the reconstruction of EC

Differential Attacks on LILLIPUT Cipher

In SAC 2013, Berger et al. defined Extended Generalized Feistel Networks (EGFN) and analyzed their security. Later, they proposed a cipher based on this structure: LILLIPUT. Impossible differential attacks and integral attacks have been mounted on LILLIPUT. We propose a tool which has found some classical, impossible and improbable differential attacks by using the variance method. It has highlighted unusual differential conditions which lead to efficient attacks by the complexity. Moreover, it is the first time we apply the generic variance method to a concrete cipher

Security analysis of NIST-LWC contest finalists

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Informatics EngineeringTraditional cryptographic standards are designed with a desktop and server environment in mind, so, with the relatively recent proliferation of small, resource constrained devices in the Internet of Things, sensor networks, embedded systems, and more, there has been a call for lightweight cryptographic standards with security, performance and resource requirements tailored for the highly-constrained environments these devices find themselves in. In 2015 the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a Standardization Process in order to select one or more Lightweight Cryptographic algorithms. Out of the original 57 submissions ten finalists remain, with ASCON and Romulus being among the most scrutinized out of them. In this dissertation I will introduce some concepts required for easy understanding of the body of work, do an up-to-date revision on the current situation on the standardization process from a security and performance standpoint, a description of ASCON and Romulus, and new best known analysis, and a comparison of the two, with their advantages, drawbacks, and unique traits.Os padrões criptográficos tradicionais foram elaborados com um ambiente de computador e servidor em mente. Com a proliferação de dispositivos de pequenas dimensões tanto na Internet of Things, redes de sensores e sistemas embutidos, apareceu uma necessidade para se definir padrões para algoritmos de criptografia leve, com prioridades de segurança, performance e gasto de recursos equilibrados para os ambientes altamente limitados em que estes dispositivos operam. Em 2015 o National Institute of Standards and Technology lançou um processo de estandardização com o objectivo de escolher um ou mais algoritmos de criptografia leve. Das cinquenta e sete candidaturas originais sobram apenas dez finalistas, sendo ASCON e Romulus dois desses finalistas mais examinados. Nesta dissertação irei introduzir alguns conceitos necessários para uma fácil compreensão do corpo deste trabalho, assim como uma revisão atualizada da situação atual do processo de estandardização de um ponto de vista tanto de segurança como de performance, uma descrição do ASCON e do Romulus assim como as suas melhores análises recentes e uma comparação entre os dois, frisando as suas vantagens, desvantagens e aspectos únicos

Cryptanalysis of Block Ciphers Using Almost-Impossible Differentials

In this paper, inspired from the notion of impossible differentials, we present a model to use differentials that are less probable than a random permutation. We introduce such a distinguisher for 2 rounds of Crypton, and present an attack on 6 rounds of this predecessor AES candidate. As a special case of this idea, we embed parts of the additional rounds around the impossible differential into the distinguisher to make a probabilistic distinguisher with more rounds. We show that with this change, the data complexity is increased but the time complexity may be reduced or increased. Then we discuss that this change in the impossible differential cryptanalysis is commodious and rational when the data complexity is low and time complexity is marginal