International Association
for Cryptologic Research

SNOW 2.0 is a word oriented stream cipher that has been selected as a standard stream cipher on ISO/IEC 18033-4. One of the general attacks on the stream ciphers is Guess and Determine attack. Heuristic GD attack is GD attack that represents an algorithmic method to analysis the stream cipher with the variables of the same size. The results of HGD attack on TIPSY, SNOW 1.0 and SNOW 2.0 stream ciphers led to less complexity rather than previously known GD attacks. In this paper, the authors use of two auxiliary polynomials to improve HGD attack on SNOW 2.0. This attack reduces the complexity and the size of the guessed basis from O (2265) to O (2192) and 8 to 6, respectively, compared with previous ad-hoc and heuristic GD attacks.