Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2001/068

SQUARE Attacks on Reduced-Round PES and IDEA Block Ciphers

J.Nakahara Jr and P.S.L.M.Barreto and B.Preneel and J.Vandewalle and H.Y.Kim

Abstract: This paper reports on variants of the Square attack applied to reduced-round versions of the PES and IDEA block ciphers. Attacks on 2.5 rounds of IDEA require $3\cdot 2^{16}$ chosen-plaintexts and recover 78 key bits. A new kind of attack, the Square related-key attack, is applied on 2.5 rounds of IDEA and recovers 32 key bits, with 2 chosen-plaintexts and $2^{17}$ related keys. Similar results hold for 2.5 rounds of PES. Implementations of the attacks on 32-bit block mini-versions of both ciphers confirmed the expected computational complexity. Although our attacks do not improve on previous approaches, this report shows new variants of the Square attack on word-oriented block ciphers like IDEA and PES.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / block ciphers, cryptanalysis, secret-key cryptography

Date: received 14 Aug 2001, last revised 22 Aug 2001

Contact author: jorge nakahara at esat kuleuven ac be

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20010822:170035 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2001/068

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion