Interpolation attack

Abstract: A classical construction of stream ciphers is to combine several LFSRs and a highly non-linear Boolean function f. Their security is usually analysed in terms of correlation attacks, that can be seen as solving a system of multivariate linear equations, true with some probability. At ICISC'02 this approach is extended to systems of higher-degree multivariate equations, and gives an attack in 292 for Toyocrypt, a Cryptrec submission. In this attack the key is found by solving an overdefined system of algebraic equations. In this paper we show how to substantially lower the degree of these equations by multiplying them by well-chosen multivariate polynomials. Thus we are able to break Toyocrypt in 249 CPU clocks, with only 20 Kbytes of keystream, the fastest attack proposed so far. We also successfully attack the Nessie submission LILI-128, within 257 CPU clocks (not the fastest attack known). In general, we show that if the Boolean function uses only a small subset (e.g. 10) of state/LFSR bits, the cipher can be broken, whatever is the Boolean function used (worst case). Our new general algebraic attack breaks stream ciphers satisfying all the previously known design criteria in at most the square root of the complexity of the previously known generic attack.

Abstract: In [6] higher order derivatives of discrete functions were considered and the concept of higher order differentials was introduced. We introduce the concept of truncated differentials and present attacks on ciphers presumably secure against differential attacks, but vulnerable to attacks using higher order and truncated differentials. Also we give a differential attack using truncated differentials on DES reduced to 6 rounds using only 46 chosen plaintexts with an expected running time of about the time of 3,500 encryptions. Finally it is shown how to find a minimum nonlinear order of a block cipher using higher order differentials.

Abstract: In this paper we present a new 128-bit block cipher called Square. The original design of Square concentrates on the resistance against differential and linear cryptanalysis. However, after the initial design a dedicated attack was mounted that forced us to augment the number of rounds. The goal of this paper is the publication of the resulting cipher for public scrutiny. A C implementation of Square is available that runs at 2.63 MByte/s on a 100 MHz Pentium. Our M68HC05 Smart Card implementation fits in 547 bytes and takes less than 2 msec. (4 MHz Clock). The high degree of parallellism allows hardware implementations in the Gbit/s range today.

Abstract: This paper is devoted to the analysis of the impact of chaos-based techniques on block encryption ciphers. We present several chaos based ciphers. Using the well-known principles in the cryptanalysis we show that these ciphers do not behave worse than the standard ones, opening in this way a novel approach to the design of block encryption ciphers.