Paper 2014/652

A Dynamic Cube Attack on $105$ round Grain v1

Subhadeep Banik

Abstract

As far as the Differential Cryptanalysis of reduced round Grain v1 is concerned, the best results were those published by Knellwolf et al. in Asiacrypt $2011$. In an extended version of the paper, it was shown that it was possible to retrieve {\bf (i)} $5$ expressions in the Secret Key bits for a variant of Grain v1 that employs $97$ rounds (in place of $160$) in its Key Scheduling process using $2^{27}$ chosen IVs and {\bf (ii)} $1$ expression in Secret Key bits for a variant that employs $104$ rounds in its Key Scheduling using $2^{35}$ chosen IVs. However, the second attack on $104$ rounds, had a success probability of around $50$\%, which is to say that the attack worked for only around one half of the Secret Keys. In this paper we propose a dynamic cube attack on $105$ round Grain v1, that has a success probability of $100$\%, and thus we report an improvement of $8$ rounds over the previous best attack on Grain v1 that attacks the entire Keyspace. We take the help of the tool $\Delta${\sf Grain}$_{\sf KSA}$, proposed by Banik at ACISP 2014, to track the differential trails induced in the internal state of Grain v1 by any difference in the IV bits, and we prove that a suitably introduced difference in the IV leads to a distinguisher for the output bit produced in the $105^{th}$ round. This, in turn, helps determine the values of $6$ expressions in the Secret Key bits.