A practical attack on the fixed RC4 in the wep mode

Abstract. In this paper we revisit a known but ignored weakness of the RC4 keystream generator, where secret state info leaks to the generated keystream, and show that this leakage, also known as Jenkins’ correlation or the RC4 glimpse, can be used to attack RC4 in several modes. Our main result is a practical key recovery attack on RC4 when an IV modifier is concatenated to the beginning of a secret root key to generate a session key. As opposed to the WEP attack from [FMS01] the new attack is applicable even in the case where the first 256 bytes of the keystream are thrown and its complexity grows only linearly with the length of the key. In an exemplifying parameter setting the attack recoversa16-bytekeyin2 48 steps using 2 17 short keystreams generated from different chosen IVs. A second attacked mode is when the IV succeeds the secret root key. We mount a key recovery attack that recovers the secret root key by analyzing a single word from 2 22 keystreams generated from different IVs, improving the attack from [FMS01] on this mode. A third result is an attack on RC4 that is applicable when the attacker can inject faults to the execution of RC4. The attacker derives the internal state and the secret key by analyzing 2 14 faulted keystreams generated from this key

Faster Correlation Attack on Bluetooth Keystream Generator E0

Abstract. We study both distinguishing and key-recovery attacks against E0, the keystream generator used in Bluetooth by means of correlation. First, a powerful computation method of correlations is formulated by a recursive expression, which makes it easier to calculate correlations of the finite state machine output sequences up to 26 bits for E0 and allows us to verify the two known correlations to be the largest for the first time. Second, we apply the concept of convolution to the analysis of the distinguisher based on all correlations, and propose an efficient distinguisher due to the linear dependency of the largest correlations. Last, we propose a novel maximum likelihood decoding algorithm based on fast Walsh transform to recover the closest codeword for any linear code of dimension L and length n. It requires time O(n + L · 2 L) and memory min(n, 2 L). This can speed up many attacks such as fast correlation attacks. We apply it to E0, and our best key-recovery attack works in 2 39 time given 2 39 consecutive bits after O(2 37) precomputation. This is the best known attack against E0 so far.

Small Scale Variants of the AES

Abstract. In this paper we define small scale variants of the AES. These variants inherit the design features of the AES and provide a suitable framework for comparing different cryptanalytic methods. In particular, we provide some preliminary results and insights when using off-theshelf computational algebra techniques to solve the systems of equations arising from these small scale variants.

The Conditional Correlation Attack: A Practical Attack on Bluetooth Encryption

Abstract. Motivated by the security of the nonlinear filter generator, the concept of correlation was previously extended to the conditional correlation, that studied the linear correlation of the inputs conditioned on a given (short) output pattern of some specific nonlinear function. Based on the conditional correlations, conditional correlation attacks were shown to be successful and efficient against the nonlinear filter generator. In this paper, we further generalize the concept of conditional correlations by assigning it with a different meaning, i.e. the correlation of the output of an arbitrary function conditioned on the unknown (partial) input which is uniformly distributed. Based on this generalized conditional correlation, a general statistical model is studied for dedicated key-recovery distinguishers. It is shown that the generalized conditional correlation is no smaller than the unconditional correlation. Consequently, our distinguisher improves on the traditional one (in the worst case it degrades into the traditional one). In particular, the distinguisher may be successful even if no ordinary correlation exists. As an application, a conditional correlation attack is developed and optimized against Bluetooth two-level E0. The attack is based on a recently detected flaw in the resynchronization of E0, as well as the investigation of conditional correlations in the Finite State Machine (FSM) governing the keystream output of E0. Our best attack finds the original encryption key for two-level E0 using the first 24 bits of 2 23.8 frames and with 2 38 computations. This is clearly the fastest and only practical known-plaintext attack on Bluetooth encryption compared with all existing attacks. Current experiments confirm our analysis

Improving the Performance of the SYND Stream Cipher

International audience. In 2007, Gaborit et al. proposed the stream cipher SYND as an improvement of the pseudo random number generator due to Fischer and Stern. This work shows how to improve considerably the e ciency the SYND cipher without using the so-called regular encoding and without compromising the security of the modi ed SYND stream cipher. Our proposal, called XSYND, uses a generic state transformation which is reducible to the Regular Syndrome Decoding problem (RSD), but has better computational characteristics than the regular encoding. A rst implementation shows that XSYND runs much faster than SYND for a comparative security level (being more than three times faster for a security level of 128 bits, and more than 6 times faster for 400-bit security), though it is still only half as fast as AES in counter mode. Parallel computation may yet improve the speed of our proposal, and we leave it as future research to improve the e ciency of our implementation

New Treatment of the BSW Sampling and Its Applications to Stream Ciphers

By combining the time-memory-data tradeoff (TMDTO) attack independently proposed by Babbage and Golic (BG) with the BSW sampling technique, this paper explores to mount a new TMDTO attack on stream ciphers. The new attack gives a wider variety of trade-offs, compared with original BG-TMDTO attack. It is efficient when multiple data is allowed for the attacker from the same key with different IVs, even though the internal state size is twice the key size. We apply the new attack to MICKEY and Grain stream ciphers, and improves the existing TMDTO attacks on them. Our attacks on Grain v1 and Grain-128 stream ciphers are rather attractive in the respect that the online time, offline time and memory complexities are all better than an exhaustive key search, and the amount of keystream needed are completely valid. Finally, we generalize the new attack to a Guess and Determine-TMDTO attack on stream ciphers, and mount a Guess and Determine-TMDTO attack on SOSEMANUK stream cipher with the online time and offline time complexities both equal to 2128, which achieves the best time com-plexity level compared with all existing attacks on SOSEMANUK so far