Cryptanalytic Attacks on IDEA Block Cipher

International data encryption algorithm (IDEA) is a secret key or symmetric key block cipher. The purpose of IDEA was to replace data encryption standard (DES) cipher, which became practically insecure due to its small key size of 56 bits and increase in computational power of systems. IDEA cipher mainly to provide data confidentiality in variety of applications such as commercial and financial application e.g. pretty good privacy (PGP) protocol. Till 2015, no successful linear or algebraic weaknesses IDEA of have been reported. In this paper, author explained IDEA cipher, its application in PGP and did a systematic survey of various attacks attempted on IDEA cipher. The best cryptanalysis result which applied to all keys could break IDEA up to 6 rounds out of 8.5 rounds of the full IDEA cipher1. But the attack requires 264 known plaintexts and 2126.8 operations for reduced round version. This attack is practically not feasible due to above mention mammoth data and time requirements. So IDEA cipher is still completely secure for practical usage. PGP v2.0 uses IDEA cipher in place of BassOmatic which was found to be insecure for providing data confidentiality

A Survey of ARX-based Symmetric-key Primitives

Addition Rotation XOR is suitable for fast implementation symmetric –key primitives, such as stream and block ciphers. This paper presents a review of several block and stream ciphers based on ARX construction followed by the discussion on the security analysis of symmetric key primitives where the best attack for every cipher was carried out. We benchmark the implementation on software and hardware according to the evaluation metrics. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a reference for a better selection of ARX design strategy

Improved DST cryptanalysis of IDEA

In this paper, we show how the Demirci-Selcuk-Ture attack, which is currently the deepest penetrating attack on the IDEA block cipher, can be improved significantly in performance. The improvements presented reduce the attack's plaintext, memory, precomputation time, and key search time complexities. These improvements also make a practical implementation of the attack on reduced versions of IDEA possible, enabling the first experimental verifications of the DST attack. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

New Attacks against Reduced-Round Versions of IDEA

In this paper, we describe a sequence of simple, yet e cient chosen-plaintext (or chosen-ciphertext) attacks against reduced-round versions of IDEA (with 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, and 4 rounds) which compare favourably with the best known attacks: some of them decrease considerably the time complexity given the same order of data at disposal while other ones decrease the amount of necessary known- or chosen-plaintext pairs under comparable time complexities. Additionally, we show how to trade time and memory for some of the known-plaintext attacks of Nakahara et al

A new meet-in-the-middle attack on the IDEA block cipher

In this paper we introduce a novel meet-in-the-middle attack on the IDEA block cipher. The attack consists of a precomputation and an elimination phase. The attack reduces the number of required plaintexts significantly for 4 and 4.5 rounds, and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first attack on the 5-round IDEA. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

Differential entropy analysis of the IDEA block cipher

This paper describes a new cryptanalytic technique that combines differential cryptanalysis with Shannon entropy. We call it differential entropy (DE). The objective is to exploit the non-uniform distribution of output differences from a given mapping as a distinguishing tool in cryptanalysis. Our preferred target is the IDEA block cipher, since we detected significantly low entropy at the output of its multiplication operation. We looked to further extend this entropy analysis to larger components and for a number of rounds. We present key-recovery attacks on up to 2.5-round IDEA in the single-key model and without weak-key assumptions. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

New Data-Efficient Attacks on Reduced-Round IDEA

IDEA is a 64-bit block cipher with 128-bit keys which is widely used due to its inclusion in several cryptographic packages such as PGP. After its introduction by Lai and Massey in 1991, it was subjected to an extensive cryptanalytic effort, but so far the largest variant on which there are any published attacks contains only 6 of its 8.5-rounds. The first 6-round attack, described in the conference version of this paper in 2007, was extremely marginal: It required essentially the entire codebook, and saved only a factor of 2 compared to the time complexity of exhaustive search. In 2009, Sun and Lai reduced the data complexity of the 6-round attack from 2^{64} to 2^{49} chosen plaintexts and simultaneously reduced the time complexity from 2^{127} to 2^{112.1} encryptions. In this revised version of our paper, we combine a highly optimized meet-in-the-middle attack with a keyless version of the Biryukov-Demirci relation to obtain new key recovery attacks on reduced-round IDEA, which dramatically reduce their data complexities and increase the number of rounds to which they are applicable. In the case of 6-round IDEA, we need only two known plaintexts (the minimal number of 64-bit messages required to determine a 128-bit key) to perform full key recovery in 2^{123.4} time. By increasing the number of known plaintexts to sixteen, we can reduce the time complexity to 2^{111.9}, which is slightly faster than the Sun and Lai data-intensive attack. By increasing the number of plaintexts to about one thousand, we can now attack 6.5 rounds of IDEA, which could not be attacked by any previously published technique. By pushing our techniques to extremes, we can attack 7.5 rounds using 2^{63} plaintexts and 2^{114} time, and by using an optimized version of a distributive attack, we can reduce the time complexity of exhaustive search on the full 8.5-round IDEA to 2^{126.8} encryptions using only 16 plaintexts