Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2007/038

Multiple Modular Additions and Crossword Puzzle Attack on NLSv2

Joo Yeon Cho and Josef Pieprzyk

Abstract: NLS is a stream cipher which was submitted to the eSTREAM project. A linear distinguishing attack against NLS was presented by Cho and Pieprzyk, which was called Crossword Puzzle (CP) attack. NLSv2 is the tweak version of NLS which aims mainly at avoiding the CP attack. In this paper, a new distinguishing attack against NLSv2 is presented. The attack exploits high correlation amongst neighboring bits of the cipher. The paper first shows that the modular addition preserves pairwise correlations as demonstrated by existence of linear approximations with large biases. Next it shows how to combine these results with the existence of high correlation between bits 29 and 30 of the S-box to obtain a distinguisher whose bias is around $2^{-37}$. Consequently, we claim that NLSv2 is distinguishable from a random process after observing around $2^{74}$ keystream words.

Category / Keywords: Distinguishing Attacks, Crossword Puzzle Attack, Stream Ciphers, eSTREAM, NLS, NLSv2

Date: received 5 Feb 2007, last revised 26 Mar 2007

Contact author: jooyeon cho at gmail com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20070326:155333 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2007/038

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