International Association
for Cryptologic Research

SIMON [3] is a family of lightweight block ciphers which has been recently proposed by U.S National Security Agency (NSA). Although the original proposal does not include any detailed security analysis but several detailed analysis has been published on this recently [1,2].

In this paper we investigate the security of this family of block ciphers against linear cryptanalysis. We present several linear characteristics for all variants of SIMON. Our best linear

characteristic covers SIMON 32/64 reduced to 13 rounds out of 32 rounds with the bias $2^{-16}. In addition we present attacks for the round reduced variants of SIMON48/96, SIMON64/128, SIMON96/144 and SIMON128/256. Our results are the best known results on linear cryptanalysis for any variant of SIMON.