Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Cryptanalysis of KTANTAN

We revisit meet-in-the-middle attacks on block ciphers and recent developments in meet-in-the-middle preimage attacks on hash functions. Despite the presence of a secret key in the block cipher case, we identify techniques that can also be mounted on block ciphers, thus allowing us to improve the cryptanalysis of the block cipher KTANTAN family. The first and major contribution is that we spot errors in previous cryptanalysis, secondly we improve upon the corrected results. Especially, the technique indirect-partial-matching can be used to increase the number of matched bits significantly, as exemplified by our attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a splice-and-cut meet-in-the-middle attack is applied to block ciphers. When the splitting point is close to the start or the end of the cipher, the attack remains to be at very low data complexity. The secret key of the full cipher can be recovered faster than exhaustive search for all three block sizes in the KTANTAN family. The attack on KTANTAN32 works with a time complexity $2^{72.9}$ in terms of full round encryptions. The attack has a time complexity of $2^{73.8}$ and $2^{74.4}$ on KTANTAN48 and KTANTAN64, respectively. Moreover, all the three attacks work with 4 chosen ciphertexts only. These results compare favourably with the factor 2 speed-up over brute force obtained in earlier work 4 , and hence these attacks are the best cryptanalysis results so far

A 3-Subset Meet-in-the-Middle Attack: Cryptanalysis of the Lightweight Block Cipher KTANTAN

status: publishe

Security Analysis Techniques Using Differential Relationships For Block Ciphers

The uses of block cipher has become crucial in nowadays’ computing era as well as the information security. Information must be available only for authenticated and authorized users.However,flaws and weaknesses in the cryptosystem can breach the security of stored and transmitted information.A weak key in the key schedule is well-known issues which may affect several round keys have same bits in common.Besides,information leaked from the implementation also affects the security of block ciphers.Based on the flaws and leakage,the adversary is able to assess the differential relationships in block cipher using differential cryptanalysis technique. Firstly,the existing differential cryptanalysis techniques have been evaluated.Secondly,based on the gaps that have to be filled in the existing differential cryptanalysis techniques,new frameworks of differential cryptanalysis techniques have been proposed and designed by using Pearson correlation coefficient,Hamming-weight leakage assumption and reference point.The Pearson correlation coefficient is used to determine the repeated differential properties in the key schedules.Meanwhile, reference point and Hamming-weight leakage assumption are used to assess the security of the implementation of block ciphers against side-channel cube attack and differential fault analysis.Thirdly,all proposed frameworks have been assessed.The results show that the repeated differential properties are found for AES, PRESENT and Simeck key schedules.However,AES key schedule is definitely ideal to be adopted in the design for the future cryptographic algorithm.In addition,the newly designed frameworks for side-channel differential analysis techniques have been able to reduce the attack complexities for Simeck32/64,KATAN32 and KTANTAN32 compared to previous work.In conclusion,the proposed frameworks are effective in analyzing the security of block ciphers using differential cryptanalysis techniques

Fault Analysis of the KTANTAN Family of Block Ciphers: A Revisited Work of Fault Analysis of the KATAN Family of Block Ciphers

This paper investigates the security of the KTANTAN block cipher against differential fault analysis. This attack is considered to be first side channel analysis of KTANTAN in the literature. KTANTAN is a relative to the KATAN block cipher. Therefore, the previous fault analysis on KATAN family of block cipher is revisited. Similar to KATAN, KTANTAN has three variants namely KTANTAN32, KTANTAN48 and KTANTAN64. The inner structure of KTANTAN is similar to KATAN except the key schedule algorithms. KATAN has been practically broken by using fault analysis, employing a transient single-bit fault model, with the assumption is that the attacker is able to inject faults randomly into the internal state of the cipher. The attack is empowerd by extended cube method similarly as applied on KATAN. The complexity of this attack is $2^{74}$ for KTANTAN32 and $2^{76}$ for both KTANTAN48 and KTANTAN64. Furthermore, based on the obtained results, this paper concludes that KTANTAN is more robust against fault analysis compared to KATAN

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

On Some Symmetric Lightweight Cryptographic Designs

This dissertation presents cryptanalysis of several symmetric lightweight primitives, both stream ciphers and block ciphers. Further, some aspects of authentication in combination with a keystream generator is investigated, and a new member of the Grain family of stream ciphers, Grain-128a, with built-in support for authentication is presented. The first contribution is an investigation of how authentication can be provided at a low additional cost, assuming a synchronous stream cipher is already implemented and used for encryption. These findings are then used when presenting the latest addition to the Grain family of stream ciphers, Grain-128a. It uses a 128-bit key and a 96-bit initialization vector to generate keystream, and to possibly also authenticate the plaintext. Next, the stream cipher BEAN, superficially similar to Grain, but notably using a weak output function and two feedback with carry shift registers (FCSRs) rather than linear and (non-FCSR) nonlinear feedback shift registers, is cryptanalyzed. An efficient distinguisher and a state-recovery attack is given. It is shown how knowledge of the state can be used to recover the key in a straightforward way. The remainder of this dissertation then focuses on block ciphers. First, a related-key attack on KTANTAN is presented. The attack notably uses only a few related keys, runs in less than half a minute on a current computer, and directly contradicts the designers' claims. It is discussed why this is, and what can be learned from this. Next, PRINTcipher is subjected to linear cryptanalysis. Several weak key classes are identified and it is shown how several observations of the same statistical property can be made for each plaintext--ciphertext pair. Finally, the invariant subspace property, first observed for certain key classes in PRINTcipher, is investigated. In particular, its connection to large linear biases is studied through an eigenvector which arises inside the cipher and leads to trail clustering in the linear hull which, under reasonable assumptions, causes a significant number of large linear biases. Simulations on several versions of PRINTcipher are compared to the theoretical findings