International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 30 August 2013

Ivica Nikolic, Lei Wang, Shuang Wu
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We propose a new type of meet-in-the-middle attack that splits the

cryptographic primitive in parallel to the execution of the operations. The result of the division are two primitives that have smaller input sizes and thus require lower attack complexities.

However, the division is not completely independent and the sub-primitives depend (output of one is the input for the other) mutually on a certain number of bits. When the number of such bits is relatively small, we show a technique based on three classical meet-in-the-middle attacks that can recover the secret key of the cipher faster than an exhaustive search. We apply our findings to the lightweight block cipher KLEIN and show attacks on 10/11/13 rounds of KLEIN-64/-80/-96.

Our approach requires only one or two pairs of known plaintexts and always recovers the secret key.

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