International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In differential-like attacks, the process typically involves extending a distinguisher forward and backward with probability 1 for some rounds and recovering the key involved in the extended part. Particularly in rectangle attacks, a holistic key recovery strategy can be employed to yield the most efficient attacks tailored to a given distinguisher. In this paper, we treat the distinguisher and the extended part as an integrated entity and give a one-step framework for finding rectangle attacks with the purpose of reducing the overall complexity or attacking more rounds. In this framework, we propose to allow probabilistic differential propagations in the extended part and incorporate the holistic recovery strategy. Additionally, we introduce the ``split-and-bunch technique'' to further reduce the time complexity. Beyond rectangle attacks, we extend these foundational concepts to encompass differential attacks as well. To demonstrate the efficiency of our framework, we apply it to Deoxys-BC-384, SKINNY, ForkSkinny, and CRAFT, achieving a series of refined and improved rectangle attacks and differential attacks. Notably, we obtain the first 15-round attack on Deoxys-BC-384, narrowing its security margin to only one round. Furthermore, our differential attack on CRAFT extends to 23 rounds, covering two more rounds than the previous best attacks.

At Asiacrypt 2022, a holistic key guessing strategy was proposed to yield the most efficient key recovery for the rectangle attack. Recently, at Crypto 2023, a new cryptanalysis technique--the differential meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack--was introduced. Inspired by these two previous works, we present three generic key recovery attacks in this paper. First, we extend the holistic key guessing strategy from the rectangle to the differential attack, proposing the generic classical differential attack (GCDA). Next, we combine the holistic key guessing strategy with the differential MITM attack, resulting in the generalized differential MITM attack (GDMA). Finally, we apply the MITM technique to the rectangle attack, creating the generic rectangle MITM attack (GRMA). In terms of applications, we improve 12/13-round attacks on AES-256. For 12-round AES-256, by using the GDMA, we reduce the time complexity by a factor of 2^{62}; by employing the GCDA, we reduce both the time and memory complexities by factors of 2^{61} and 2^{56}, respectively. For 13-round AES-256, we present a new differential attack with data and time complexities of 2^{89} and 2^{240}, where the data complexity is 2^{37} times lower than previously published results. These are currently the best attacks on AES-256 using only two related keys. For KATAN-32, we increase the number of rounds covered by the differential attack from 115 to 151 in the single-key setting using the basic differential MITM attack (BDMA) and GDMA. Furthermore, we achieve the first 38-round rectangle attack on SKINNYe-64-256 v2 by using the GRMA.

The Demirci-Sel{\c{c}}uk meet-in-the-middle (DS-MITM) attack is a sophisticated variant of differential attacks. Due to its sophistication, it is hard to efficiently find the best DS-MITM attacks on most ciphers \emph{except} for AES. Moreover, the current automatic tools only capture the most basic version of DS-MITM attacks, and the critical techniques developed for enhancing the attacks (e.g., differential enumeration and key-dependent-sieve) still rely on manual work. In this paper, we develop a full-fledged automatic framework integrating all known techniques (differential enumeration, key-dependent-sieve, and key bridging, etc) for the DS-MITM attack that can produce key-recovery attacks directly rather than only search for distinguishers. Moreover, we develop a new technique that is able to exploit partial key additions to generate more linear relations beneficial to the attacks. We apply the framework to the SKINNY family of block ciphers and significantly improved results are obtained. In particular, all known DS-MITM attacks on the respective versions of SKINNY are improved by at least 2 rounds, and the data, memory, or time complexities of some attacks are reduced even compared to previous best attacks penetrating less rounds.

The rectangle attack has shown to be a very powerful form of cryptanalysis against block ciphers. Given a rectangle distinguisher, one expects to mount key recovery attacks as efficiently as possible. In the literature, there have been four algorithms for rectangle key recovery attacks. However, their performance vary from case to case. Besides, numerous are the applications where the attacks lack optimality. In this paper, we investigate the rectangle key recovery in depth and propose a unified and generic key recovery algorithm, which supports any possible attacking parameters. Notably, it not only covers the four previous rectangle key recovery algorithms, but also unveils five types of new attacks which were missed previously. Along with the new key recovery algorithm, we propose a framework for automatically finding the best attacking parameters, with which the time complexity of the rectangle attack will be minimized using the new algorithm. To demonstrate the efficiency of the new key recovery algorithm, we apply it to Serpent, CRAFT, SKINNY and Deoxys-BC-256 based on existing distinguishers and obtain a series of improved rectangle attacks.

In this work, we focus on collision attacks against instances of \shac hash family in both classical and quantum settings. Since the 5-round collision attacks on \shacc-256 and other variants proposed by Guo \etal at JoC~2020, no other essential progress has been published. With a thorough investigation, we identify that the challenges of extending such collision attacks on \shac to more rounds lie in the inefficiency of differential trail search. To overcome this obstacle, we develop a \sat automatic search toolkit. The tool is used in multiple intermediate steps of the collision attacks and exhibits surprisingly high efficiency in differential trail search and other optimization problems encountered in the process. As a result, we present the first 6-round classical collision attack on \shakea with time complexity \cpshake, which also forms a quantum collision attack with quantum time \cpshakeq, and the first 6-round quantum collision attack on \shacc-224 and \shacc-256 with quantum time \cpshattf and \cpshatfs, where $S$ represents the hardware resources of the quantum computer. The fact that classical collision attacks do not apply to 6-round \shacc-224 and \shacc-256 shows the higher coverage of quantum collision attacks, which is consistent with that on SHA-2 observed by Hosoyamada and Sasaki at CRYPTO~2021.

The double boomerang connectivity table (DBCT) is a new table proposed recently to capture the behavior of two consecutive S-boxes in boomerang attacks. In this paper, we observe an interesting property of DBCT of S-box that the ladder switch and the S-box switch happen in most cases for two continuous S-boxes, and for some S-boxes only S-box switch and ladder switch are possible. This property implies an additional criterion for S-boxes to resist the boomerang attacks and provides as well a new evaluation direction for an S-box. Using an extension of the DBCT, we verify that some boomerang distinguishers of TweAES and Deoxys are flawed. On the other hand, inspired by the property, we put forward a formula for estimating boomerang cluster probabilities. Furthermore, we introduce the first model to search for boomerang distinguishers with good cluster probabilities. Applying the model to CRAFT, we obtain 9-round and 10-round boomerang distinguishers with a higher probability than that of previous works.

The boomerang and rectangle attacks are adaptions of differential cryptanalysis that regard the target cipher E as a composition of two sub-ciphers, i.e., E = E1 ∘ E0, to construct a distinguisher for E with probability p2q2 by concatenating two short differential trails for E0 and E1 with probability p and q respectively. According to the previous research, the dependency between these two differential characteristics has a great impact on the probability of boomerang and rectangle distinguishers. Dunkelman et al. proposed the sandwich attack to formalise such dependency that regards E as three parts, i.e., E = E1 ∘ Em ∘ E0, where Em contains the dependency between two differential trails, satisfying some differential propagation with probability r. Accordingly, the entire probability is p2q2r. Recently, Song et al. have proposed a general framework to identify the actual boundaries of Em and systematically evaluate the probability of Em with any number of rounds, and applied their method to accurately evaluate the probabilities of the best SKINNY’s boomerang distinguishers. In this paper, using a more advanced method to search for boomerang distinguishers, we show that the best previous boomerang distinguishers for SKINNY can be significantly improved in terms of probability and number of rounds. More precisely, we propose related-tweakey boomerang distinguishers for up to 19, 21, 23, and 25 rounds of SKINNY-64-128, SKINNY-128-256, SKINNY-64-192 and SKINNY-128-384 respectively, which improve the previous boomerang distinguishers of these variants of SKINNY by 1, 2, 1, and 1 round respectively. Based on the improved boomerang distinguishers for SKINNY, we provide related-tweakey rectangle attacks on 23 rounds of SKINNY-64-128, 24 rounds of SKINNY-128-256, 29 rounds of SKINNY-64-192, and 30 rounds of SKINNY-128-384. It is worth noting that our improved related-tweakey rectangle attacks on SKINNY-64-192, SKINNY-128-256 and SKINNY-128-384 can be directly applied for the same number of rounds of ForkSkinny-64-192, ForkSkinny-128-256 and ForkSkinny-128-384 respectively. CRAFT is another SKINNY-like tweakable block cipher for which we provide the security analysis against rectangle attack for the first time. As a result, we provide a 14-round boomerang distinguisher for CRAFT in the single-tweak model based on which we propose a single-tweak rectangle attack on 18 rounds of this cipher. Moreover, following the previous research regarding the evaluation of switching in multiple rounds of boomerang distinguishers, we also introduce new tools called Double Boomerang Connectivity Table (DBCT), LBCT⫤, and UBCT⊨ to evaluate the boomerang switch through the multiple rounds more accurately.

CRAFT is a lightweight block cipher, designed to provide efficient protection against differential fault attacks. It is a tweakable cipher that includes 32 rounds to produce a ciphertext from a 64-bit plaintext using a 128-bit key and 64-bit public tweak. In this paper, compared to the designers’ analysis, we provide a more detailed analysis of CRAFT against differential and zero-correlation cryptanalysis, aiming to provide better distinguishers for the reduced rounds of the cipher. Our distinguishers for reduced-round CRAFT cover a higher number of rounds compared to the designers’ analysis. In our analysis, we observed that, for any number of rounds, the differential effect of CRAFT has an extremely higher probability compared to any differential trail. As an example, while the best trail for 11 rounds of the cipher has a probability of at least 2−80, we present a differential with probability 2−49.79, containing 229.66 optimal trails, all with the same optimum probability of 2−80. Next, we use a partitioning technique, based on optimal expandable truncated trails to provide a better estimation of the differential effect on CRAFT. Thanks to this technique, we are able to find differential distinguishers for 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 rounds of the cipher in single tweak model with the probabilities of at least 2−40.20, 2−45.12, 2−49.79, 2−54.49, 2−59.13, and 2−63.80, respectively. These probabilities should be compared with the best distinguishers provided by the designers in the same model for 9 and 10 rounds of the cipher with the probabilities of at least 2−54.67 and 2−62.61, respectively. In addition, we consider the security of CRAFT against the new concept of related tweak zero-correlation (ZC) linear cryptanalysis and present a new distinguisher which covers 14 rounds of the cipher, while the best previous ZC distinguisher covered 13 rounds. Thanks to the related tweak ZC distinguisher for 14 rounds of the cipher, we also present 14 rounds integral distinguishers in related tweak mode of the cipher. Although the provided analysis does not compromise the cipher, we think it provides a better insight into the designing of CRAFT.

The Keccak hash function is the winner of the SHA-3 competition (2008–2012) and became the SHA-3 standard of NIST in 2015. In this paper, we focus on practical collision attacks against round-reduced SHA-3 and some Keccak variants. Following the framework developed by Dinur et al. at FSE 2012 where 4-round collisions were found by combining 3-round differential trails and 1-round connectors, we extend the connectors to up to three rounds and hence achieve collision attacks for up to 6 rounds. The extension is possible thanks to the large degree of freedom of the wide internal state. By linearizing S-boxes of the first round, the problem of finding solutions of 2-round connectors is converted to that of solving a system of linear equations. When linearization is applied to the first two rounds, 3-round connectors become possible. However, due to the quick reduction in the degree of freedom caused by linearization, the connector succeeds only when the 3-round differential trails satisfy some additional conditions. We develop dedicated strategies for searching differential trails and find that such special differential trails indeed exist. To summarize, we obtain the first real collisions on six instances, including three round-reduced instances of SHA-3 , namely 5-round SHAKE128 , SHA3 -224 and SHA3 -256, and three instances of Keccak contest, namely Keccak [1440, 160, 5, 160], Keccak [640, 160, 5, 160] and Keccak [1440, 160, 6, 160], improving the number of practically attacked rounds by two. It is remarked that the work here is still far from threatening the security of the full 24-round SHA-3 family.

In this paper, we propose Tweak-aNd-Tweak (TNT for short) mode, which builds a tweakable block cipher from three independent block ciphers. TNT handles the tweak input by simply XOR-ing the unmodified tweak into the internal state of block ciphers twice. Due to its simplicity, TNT can also be viewed as a way of turning a block cipher into a tweakable block cipher by dividing the block cipher into three chunks, and adding the tweak at the two cutting points only. TNT is proven to be of beyond-birthday-bound $2^{2n/3}$ security, under the assumption that the three chunks are independent secure $n$-bit SPRPs. It clearly brings minimum possible overhead to both software and hardware implementations. To demonstrate this, an instantiation named TNT-AES with 6, 6, 6 rounds of AES as the underlying block ciphers is proposed. Besides the inherent proven security bound and tweak-independent rekeying feature of the TNT mode, the performance of TNT-AES is comparable with all existing TBCs designed through modular methods.

Tweakable block ciphers (TBCs) have been established as a valuable replacement for many applications of classical block ciphers. While several dedicated TBCs have been proposed in the previous years, generic constructions that build a TBC from a classical block cipher are still highly useful, for example, to reuse an existing implementation. However, most generic constructions need an additional call to either the block cipher or a universal hash function to process the tweak, which limited their efficiency. To address this deficit, Bao et al. proposed Tweak-aNd-Tweak (TNT) at EUROCRYPT'20. Their construction chains three calls to independent keyed permutations and adds the unmodified tweak to the state in between the calls. They further suggested an efficient instantiation TNT-AES that was based on round-reduced AES for each of the permutations. Their work could prove 2n/3-bit security for their construction, where n is the block size in bits. Though, in the absence of an upper bound, their analysis had to consider all possible attack vectors with up to 2^n time, data, and memory. Still, closing the gap between both bounds remained a highly interesting research question. In this work, we show that a variant of Mennink's distinguisher on CLRW2 with O(sqrt{n} 2^{3n/4}) data and O(2^{3n/2}) time from TCC'18 also applies to TNT. We reduce its time complexity to O(sqrt{n} 2^{3n/4}), show the existence of a second similar distinguisher, and demonstrate how to transform the distinguisher to a key-recovery attack on TNT-AES[5,*,*] from an impossible differential. From a constructive point of view, we adapt the rigorous STPRP analysis of CLRW2 by Jha and Nandi to show O(2^{3n/4}) TPRP security for TNT. Thus, we move towards closing the gap between the previous proof and attacks for TNT as well as its proposed instance.

The boomerang attack is a variant of differential cryptanalysis which regards a block cipher E as the composition of two sub-ciphers, i.e., E = E1 o E0, and which constructs distinguishers for E with probability p2q2 by combining differential trails for E0 and E1 with probability p and q respectively. However, the validity of this attack relies on the dependency between the two differential trails. Murphy has shown cases where probabilities calculated by p2q2 turn out to be zero, while techniques such as boomerang switches proposed by Biryukov and Khovratovich give rise to probabilities greater than p2q2. To formalize such dependency to obtain a more accurate estimation of the probability of the distinguisher, Dunkelman et al. proposed the sandwich framework that regards E as Ẽ1 o Em o Ẽ0, where the dependency between the two differential trails is handled by a careful analysis of the probability of the middle part Em. Recently, Cid et al. proposed the Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT) which unifies the previous switch techniques and incompatibility together and evaluates the probability of Em theoretically when Em is composed of a single S-box layer. In this paper, we revisit the BCT and propose a generalized framework which is able to identify the actual boundaries of Em which contains dependency of the two differential trails and systematically evaluate the probability of Em with any number of rounds. To demonstrate the power of this new framework, we apply it to two block ciphers SKINNY and AES. In the application to SKINNY, the probabilities of four boomerang distinguishers are re-evaluated. It turns out that Em involves5 or 6 rounds and the probabilities of the full distinguishers are much higher than previously evaluated. In the application to AES, the new framework is used to exclude incompatibility and find high probability distinguishers of AES-128 under the related-subkey setting. As a result, a 6-round distinguisher with probability 2−109.42 is constructed. Lastly, we discuss the relation between the dependency of two differential trails in boomerang distinguishers and the properties of components of the cipher.

This paper presents a cryptanalysis of full Kravatte, an instantiation of the Farfalle construction of a pseudorandom function (PRF) with variable input and output length. This new construction, proposed by Bertoni et al., introduces an efficiently parallelizable and extremely versatile building block for the design of symmetric mechanisms, e.g. message authentication codes or stream ciphers. It relies on a set of permutations and on so-called rolling functions: it can be split into a compression layer followed by a two-step expansion layer. The key is expanded and used to mask the inputs and outputs of the construction. Kravatte instantiates Farfalle using linear rolling functions and permutations obtained by iterating the Keccak round function.We develop in this paper several attacks against this PRF, based on three different attack strategies that bypass part of the construction and target a reduced number of permutation rounds. A higher order differential distinguisher exploits the possibility to build an affine space of values in the cipher state after the compression layer. An algebraic meet-in-the-middle attack can be mounted on the second step of the expansion layer. Finally, due to the linearity of the rolling function and the low algebraic degree of the Keccak round function, a linear recurrence distinguisher can be found on intermediate states of the second step of the expansion layer. All the attacks rely on the ability to invert a small number of the final rounds of the construction. In particular, the last two rounds of the construction together with the final masking by the key can be algebraically inverted, which allows to recover the key.The complexities of the devised attacks, applied to the Kravatte specifications published on the IACR ePrint in July 2017, or the strengthened version of Kravatte recently presented at ECC 2017, are far below the security claimed.

In this paper, we propose a new MILP modeling to find better or even optimal choices of conditional cubes, under the general framework of conditional cube attacks. These choices generally find new or improved attacks against the keyed constructions based on Keccak permutation and its variants, including Keccak-MAC, KMAC, Keyak, and Ketje, in terms of attack complexities or the number of attacked rounds. Interestingly, conditional cube attacks were applied to round-reduced Keccak-MAC, but not to KMAC despite the great similarity between Keccak-MAC and KMAC, and the fact that KMAC is the NIST standard way of constructing MAC from SHA-3. As examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of our new modeling, we report key recovery attacks against KMAC128 and KMAC256 reduced to 7 and 9 rounds, respectively; the best attack against Lake Keyak with 128-bit key is improved from 6 to 8 rounds in the nonce-respected setting and 9 rounds of Lake Keyak can be attacked if the key size is of 256 bits; attack complexity improvements are found generally on other constructions. Our new model is also applied to Keccak-based full-state keyed sponge and gives a positive answer to the open question proposed by Bertoni et al. whether cube attacks can be extended to more rounds by exploiting full-state absorbing. To verify the correctness of our attacks, reduced-variants of the attacks are implemented and verified on a PC practically. It is remarked that this work does not threaten the security of any full version of the instances analyzed in this paper.

Cube-attack-like cryptanalysis on round-reduced Keccak was proposed by Dinur et al. at EUROCRYPT 2015. It recovers the key through two phases: the preprocessing phase for precomputing a look-up table and online phase for querying the output and getting the cube sum with which the right key can be retrieved by looking up the precomputed table. It was shown that such attacks are efficient specifically for Keccak-based constructions with small nonce or message block size. In this paper, we provide a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for cubeattack- like cryptanalysis on keyed Keccak, which does not impose any unnecessary constraint on cube variables and finds almost optimal cubes by balancing the two phases of cube-attack-like cryptanalysis. Our model is applied to Ketje Jr, Ketje Sr, a Xoodoo-based authenticated encryption and Keccak-MAC-512, all of which have a relatively small nonce or message block size. As a result, time complexities of 5-round attacks on Ketje Jr and 7-round attacks on Ketje Sr can be improved significantly. Meanwhile, 6-round attacks, one more round than the previous best attack, are possible if the key size of Ketje V1 (V2) is reduced to 72 (80) bits. For Xoodoo-based AE in Ketje style, the attack reaches 6 rounds. Additionally, a 7-round attack of Keccak-MAC-512 is achieved. To verify the correctness of our attacks, a 5-round attack on Ketje V1 is implemented and tested practically. It is noted that this work does not threaten the security of any Keccak-based construction.

In this article, we provide the first independent security analysis of Deoxys, a third-round authenticated encryption candidate of the CAESAR competition, and its internal tweakable block ciphers Deoxys-BC-256 and Deoxys-BC-384. We show that the related-tweakey differential bounds provided by the designers can be greatly improved thanks to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based search tool. In particular, we develop a new method to incorporate linear incompatibility in the MILP model. We use this tool to generate valid differential paths for reduced-round versions of Deoxys-BC-256 and Deoxys-BC-384, later combining them into broader boomerang or rectangle attacks. Here, we also develop a new MILP model which optimises the two paths by taking into account the effect of the ladder switch technique. Interestingly, with the tweak in Deoxys-BC providing extra input as opposed to a classical block cipher, we can even consider beyond full-codebook attacks. As these primitives are based on the TWEAKEY framework, we further study how the security of the cipher is impacted when playing with the tweak/key sizes. All in all, we are able to attack 10 rounds of Deoxys-BC-256 (out of 14) and 13 rounds of Deoxys-BC-384 (out of 16). The extra rounds specified in Deoxys-BC to balance the tweak input (when compared to AES) seem to provide about the same security margin as AES-128. Finally we analyse why the authenticated encryption modes of Deoxys mostly prevent our attacks on Deoxys-BC to apply to the authenticated encryption primitive.

In CRYPTO’16, a new family of tweakable lightweight block ciphers - SKINNY was introduced. Denoting the variants of SKINNY as SKINNY-n-t, where n represents the block size and t represents the tweakey length, the design specifies t ∈ {n, 2n, 3n}. In this work, we evaluate the security of SKINNY against differential cryptanalysis in the related-tweakey model. First, we investigate truncated related-tweakey differential trails of SKINNY and search for the longest impossible and rectangle distinguishers where there is only one active cell in the input and the output. Based on the distinguishers obtained, 19, 23 and 27 rounds of SKINNY-n-n, SKINNY-n-2n and SKINNY-n-3n can be attacked respectively. Next, actual differential trails for SKINNY under related-tweakey model are explored and optimal differential trails of SKINNY-64 within certain number of rounds are searched with an indirect searching method based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. The results show a trend that as the number of rounds increases, the probability of optimal differential trails is much lower than the probability derived from the lower bounds of active Sboxes in SKINNY.