On the division property of S-boxes

In 2015, Todo introduced a property of multisets of a finite field called the division property. It is then used by Todo in an attack against the S7 S-box of the MISTY1 cipher. This paper provides a complete mathematical analysis of the division property. The tool we use is the discrete Fourier transform. We relate the division property to the natural concept of the degree of a subset of a finite field. This indeed provides a characterization of multisets satisfying the division property. In 2015, Sun et al. gave some properties related to the division property. In this paper we give a complete characterization and reprove many of their results. We show that the division property is actually the dual of the degree of $t$-products of the inverse S-box and show these two characteristics are affine invariants. We then propose a very efficient way to check vulnerability of a given S-box against attacks of this type. We also reprove some recent interesting results using the method based on the discrete Fourier transform. We finally check whether the S-boxes of the candidate ciphers in the CAESAR competition are vulnerable against attacks based on the division property

Preimage Attacks on Reduced-Round Ascon-Xof

Ascon, a family of algorithms that supports authenticated encryption and hashing, has been selected as the new standard for lightweight cryptography in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Project. Ascon’s permutation and authenticated encryption have been actively analyzed, but there are relatively few analyses on the hashing. In this paper, we concentrate on preimage attacks on Ascon-Xof. We focus on linearizing the polynomials leaked by the hash value to find its inverse. In an attack on 2-round Ascon-Xof, we carefully construct the set of guess bits using a greedy algorithm in the context of guess-and-determine. This allows us to attack Ascon-Xof more efficiently than the method in Dobraunig et al., and we fully implement our attack to demonstrate its effectiveness. We also provide the number of guess bits required to linearize one output bit after 3- and 4-round Ascon’s permutation, respectively. In particular, for the first time, we connect the result for 3-round Ascon to a preimage attack on Ascon-Xof with a 64-bit output. Our attacks primarily focus on analyzing weakened versions of Ascon-Xof, where the weakening involves setting all the IV values to 0 and omitting the round constants. Although our attacks do not compromise the security of the full Ascon-Xof, they provide new insights into their security