Linear Cryptanalysis: Key Schedules and Tweakable Block Ciphers

This paper serves as a systematization of knowledge of linear cryptanalysis and provides novel insights in the areas of key schedule design and tweakable block ciphers. We examine in a step by step manner the linear hull theorem in a general and consistent setting. Based on this, we study the influence of the choice of the key scheduling on linear cryptanalysis, a – notoriously difficult – but important subject. Moreover, we investigate how tweakable block ciphers can be analyzed with respect to linear cryptanalysis, a topic that surprisingly has not been scrutinized until now

Bison: Instantiating the Whitened Swap-Or-Not Construction

International audienceWe give the first practical instance-bison-of the Whitened Swap-Or-Not construction. After clarifying inherent limitations of the construction, we point out that this way of building block ciphers allows easy and very strong arguments against differential attacks

Generating graphs packed with paths: Estimation of linear approximations and differentials:Estimation of linear approximations and differentials

When designing a new symmetric-key primitive, the designer must show resistance to known attacks. Perhaps most prominent amongst these are linear and differential cryptanalysis. However, it is notoriously difficult to accurately demonstrate e.g. a block cipher’s resistance to these attacks, and thus most designers resort to deriving bounds on the linear correlations and differential probabilities of their design. On the other side of the spectrum, the cryptanalyst is interested in accurately assessing the strength of a linear or differential attack. While several tools have been developed to search for optimal linear and differential trails, e.g. MILP and SAT based methods, only few approaches specifically try to find as many trails of a single approximation or differential as possible. This can result in an overestimate of a cipher’s resistance to linear and differential attacks, as was for example the case for PRESENT. In this work, we present a new algorithm for linear and differential trail search. The algorithm represents the problem of estimating approximations and differentials as the problem of finding many long paths through a multistage graph. We demonstrate that this approach allows us to find a very large number of good trails for each approximation or differential. Moreover, we show how the algorithm can be used to efficiently estimate the key dependent correlation distribution of a linear approximation, facilitating advanced linear attacks. We apply the algorithm to 17 different ciphers, and present new and improved results on several of these

Improved Parameter Estimates for Correlation and Capacity Deviates in Linear Cryptanalysis

Statistical attacks form an important class of attacks against block ciphers. By analyzing the distribution of the statistics involved in the attack, cryptanalysts aim at providing a good estimate of the data complexity of the attack. Recently multiple papers have drawn attention to how to improve the accuracy of the estimated success probability of linear key-recovery attacks. In particular, the effect of the key on the distribution of the sample correlation and capacity has been investigated and new statistical models developed. The major problem that remains open is how to obtain accurate estimates of the mean and variance of the correlation and capacity. In this paper, we start by presenting a solution for a linear approximation which has a linear hull comprising a number of strong linear characteristics. Then we generalize this approach to multiple and multidimensional linear cryptanalysis and derive estimates of the variance of the test statistic. Our simplest estimate can be computed given the number of the strong linear approximations involved in the offline analysis and the resulting estimate of the capacity. The results tested experimentally on SMALLPRESENT-[4] show the accuracy of the estimated variance is significantly improved. As an application we give more realistic estimates of the success probability of the multidimensional linear attack of Cho on 26 rounds of PRESENT