Paper 2010/574

Cryptanalysis of PRESENT-like ciphers with secret S-boxes

Julia Borghoff and Lars R. Knudsen and Gregor Leander and Soeren S. Thomsen

Abstract

At Eurocrypt 2001, Biryukov and Shamir investigated the security of AES-like ciphers where the substitutions and affine transformations are all key-dependent and successfully cryptanalysed two and a half rounds. This paper considers PRESENT-like ciphers in a similar manner. We focus on the settings where the S-boxes are key dependent, and repeated for every round. We break one particular variant which was proposed in 2009 with practical complexity in a chosen plaintext/chosen ciphertext scenario. Extrapolating these results suggests that up to 28 rounds of such ciphers can be broken. Furthermore, we outline how our attack strategy can be applied to an extreme case where the S-boxes are chosen uniformly at random for each round and where the bit permutation is secret as well.