Title: Differential-linear cryptanalysis of SIMON32/64

Authors: Yanqin Chen; Wenying Zhang

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, 250014 Jinan, Shandong, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, 250014 Jinan, Shandong, China

Abstract: Simon is a family of lightweight block ciphers designed by the U.S National Security Agency in 2013. Simon 2n/k is a cipher in this family with k-bit key and 2n-bit block. So far, there have been several cryptanalytic results on this cipher by means of differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis and impossible differential cryptanalysis. In this paper, we improve the previous linear cryptanalysis by differential-linear cryptanalysis, which is based on the use of a differential-linear distinguisher constructed by concatenating a linear approximation with a differential. The number of attacks is not increased, but the time complexity of attacks on 18-round Simon32 is reduced from 2³² to 2¹⁹. In addition, we present a key recovery attack on 18 and 19 rounds of Simon32 based on differential-linear distinguisher.

Keywords: Simon block cipher; differential cryptanalysis; linear cryptanalysis; differential-linear cryptanalysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2018.091778

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2018 Vol.10 No.3, pp.196 - 202

Received: 28 Jul 2016
Accepted: 03 Nov 2016
Published online: 16 May 2018 *

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