International Association for Cryptologic Research

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SPEEDY: Caught at Last

Authors:
Christina Boura , IRIF, Université Paris Cité, France
Patrick Derbez , Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA
Baptiste Germon , Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA
Rachelle Heim Boissier , UCLouvain, ICTEAM/ELEN/Crypto Group, Belgium
María Naya-Plasencia , Inria, France
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Conference: ASIACRYPT 2025
Abstract: SPEEDY is a family of ultra-low-latency block ciphers designed by Leander et al. in 2021. In 2023, Boura et al. proposed a differential attack on the full 7-round variant, SPEEDY-7-192. However, shortly thereafter, Beyne and Neyt demonstrated that this attack was invalid, as the dominant differential characteristic it relied upon had probability zero. A similar issue affects another differential attack proposed the same year by Wang et al., which also targets SPEEDY-7-192 and suffers from the same flaw. As a result, although SPEEDY-7-192 was initially believed to be broken, it remained unbroken in practice, and the question of finding a valid attack on this cipher remained an open problem. In this work, we resolve this problem by presenting the first valid differential attack on SPEEDY-7-192. We verify the validity of our distinguisher using the quasidifferential framework. Moreover, our search for the differential distinguisher is significantly more rigorous than in the previous works, allowing us to explore a larger portion of the search space. We also fully exploit probabilistic extensions of the distinguisher to identify optimal parameters for the key recovery step. Our attack on SPEEDY-7-192 has data and time complexities of 2^{186.36} encryption calls and a memory complexity of 2^{84} 192-bit states. In addition, we present differential attacks on 4-round SPEEDY-5-192 and 5-round SPEEDY-6-192 which currently represent the best attacks against these smaller variants.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{asiacrypt-2025-36013,
  title={SPEEDY: Caught at Last},
  publisher={Springer-Verlag},
  author={Christina Boura and Patrick Derbez and Baptiste Germon and Rachelle Heim Boissier and María Naya-Plasencia},
  year=2025
}