A Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on ARIA

In this paper, we study the meet-in-the-middle attack against block cipher ARIA. We find some new 3-round and 4-round distinguish- ing properties of ARIA. Based on the 3-round distinguishing property, we can apply the meet-in-the-middle attack with up to 6 rounds for all versions of ARIA. Based on the 4-round distinguishing property, we can mount a successful attack on 8-round ARIA-256. Furthermore, the 4-round distinguishing property could be improved which leads to a 7-round attack on ARIA-192. The data and time complexities of 7-round attack are 2^120 and 2^185:3, respectively. The data and time complexities of 8-round attack are 2^56 and 2^251:6, respectively. Compared with the existing cryptanalytic results on ARIA, our 5-round attack has the lowest data and time complexities and the 6-round attack has the lowest data complexity. Moreover, it is shown that 8-round ARIA-256 is not immune to the meet-in-the-middle attack

Algebraic Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on LowMC

By exploiting the feature of partial nonlinear layers, we propose a new technique called algebraic meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to analyze the security of LowMC, which can reduce the memory complexity of the simple difference enumeration attack over the state-of-the-art. Moreover, while an efficient algebraic technique to retrieve the full key from a differential trail of LowMC has been proposed at CRYPTO 2021, its time complexity is still exponential in the key size. In this work, we show how to reduce it to constant time when there are a sufficiently large number of active S-boxes in the trail. With the above new techniques, the attacks on LowMC and \mbox{LowMC-M} published at CRYPTO 2021 are further improved, and some LowMC instances could be broken for the first time. Our results seem to indicate that partial nonlinear layers are still not well-understood

Applying Time-Memory-Data Trade-Off to Meet-in-the-Middle Attack

In this paper, we present several new attacks on multiple encryption block ciphers based on the meet-in-the-middle attack. In the first attack (GDD-MTM), we guess a certain number of secret key bits and apply the meet-in-the-middle attack on multiple ciphertexts. The second attack (TMTO-MTM) is derived from applying the time-memory trade-off attack to the meet-in-the-middle attack on a single ciphertext. We may also use rainbow chains in the table construction to get the Rainbow-MTM attack. The fourth attack (BS-MTM) is defined by combining the time-memory-data trade-off attack proposed by Biryukov and Shamir to the meet-in-the-middle attack on multiple ciphertexts. Lastly, for the final attack (TMD-MTM), we apply the TMTO-Data curve, which demonstrates the general methodology for multiple data trade-offs, to the meet-in-the-middle attack. GDD-MTM requires no pre-processing, but the attack complexity is high while memory requirement is low. In the last four attacks, pre-processing is required but we can achieve lower (faster) online attack complexity at the expense of more memory in comparison with the GDD-MTM attack. To illustrate how the attacks may be used, we applied them in the cryptanalysis of triple DES. In particular, for the BS-MTM attack, we managed to achieve pre-computation and data complexity which are much lower while maintaining almost the same memory and online attack complexity, as compared to a time-memory-data trade-off attack by Biryukov et al. at SAC 2005. In all, our new methodologies offer viable alternatives and provide more flexibility in achieving time-memory-data trade-offs

Bad Directions in Cryptographic Hash Functions

A 25-gigabyte "point obfuscation" challenge "using security parameter 60" was announced at the Crypto 2015 rump session; "point obfuscation" is another name for password hashing. This paper shows that the particular matrix-multiplication hash function used in the challenge is much less secure than previous password-hashing functions are believed to be. This paper's attack algorithm broke the challenge in just 19 minutes using a cluster of 21 PCs. Keywords: symmetric cryptography, hash functions, password hashing, point obfuscation, matrix multiplication, meet-in-the-middle attacks, meet-in-many-middles attack

Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on QARMA Block Cipher

QARMA is a recently published lightweight tweakable block cipher, which has been used by the ARMv8 architecture to support a software protection feature. In this paper, using the method of MITM, we give the first distinguisher of QARMA block cipher. It is made up of the \emph{Pseudo-Reflector} construction with two forward rounds and three backward rounds. By adding two rounds on the top and three rounds on the bottom of the distinguisher, together with the idea of the differential enumeration technique and the key-dependent sieve skill, we achieve a 10-round (of 16-round) key recovery attack with memory complexity of $2^{116}$ 192-bit space, data complexity of $2^{53}$ chosen plaintexts and time complexity of $2^{70.1}$ encryption units. Furthermore, we use the same distinguisher to attack QARMA-128 which also includes 10 (of 24) round functions and the \emph{Pseudo-Refector} construction. The memory complexity is $2^{232}$ 384-bit space, the data complexity is $2^{105}$ chosen plaintexts and the time complexity is $2^{141.7}$ encryption units. These are the first attacks on QARMA and do not threaten the security of full round QARMA

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

status: publishe

Programming the Demirci-Selçuk Meet-in-the-Middle Attack with Constraints

International audienceCryptanalysis with SAT/SMT, MILP and CP has increased in popularity among symmetric-key cryptanalysts and designers due to its high degree of automation. So far, this approach covers differential, linear, impossible differential, zero-correlation, and integral cryptanaly-sis. However, the Demirci-Selçuk meet-in-the-middle (DS-MITM) attack is one of the most sophisticated techniques that has not been automated with this approach. By an in-depth study of Derbez and Fouque's work on DS-MITM analysis with dedicated search algorithms, we identify the crux of the problem and present a method for automatic DS-MITM attack based on general constraint programming, which allows the crypt-analysts to state the problem at a high level without having to say how it should be solved. Our method is not only able to enumerate distin-guishers but can also partly automate the key-recovery process. This approach makes the DS-MITM cryptanalysis more straightforward and easier to follow, since the resolution of the problem is delegated to off-the-shelf constraint solvers and therefore decoupled from its formulation. We apply the method to SKINNY, TWINE, and LBlock, and we get the currently known best DS-MITM attacks on these ciphers. Moreover, to demonstrate the usefulness of our tool for the block cipher designers, we exhaustively evaluate the security of 8! = 40320 versions of LBlock instantiated with different words permutations in the F functions. It turns out that the permutation used in the original LBlock is one of the 64 permutations showing the strongest resistance against the DS-MITM attack. The whole process is accomplished on a PC in less than 2 hours. The same process is applied to TWINE, and similar results are obtained