International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The block cipher used in the Chinese Wireless LAN Standard (WAPI), SMS4, was recently renamed as SM4, and became the block cipher standard issued by the Chinese government. This paper improves the previous linear cryptanalysis of SMS4 by giving the first 19-round one-dimensional approximations. The 19-round approximations hold with bias 2^{−62.27}; we use one of them to leverage a linear attack on 23-round SMS4. Our attack improves the previous 23-round attacks by reducing the time complexity. Furthermore, the data complexity of our attack is further improved by the multidimensional linear approach.