Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2016/271

Cryptanalysis of the FLIP Family of Stream Ciphers

Sébastien Duval and Virginie Lallemand and Yann Rotella

Abstract: At Eurocrypt 2016, Méaux et al. proposed FLIP, a new family of stream ciphers intended for use in Fully Homomorphic Encryption systems. Unlike its competitors which either have a low initial noise that grows at each successive encryption, or a high constant noise, the FLIP family of ciphers achieves a low constant noise thanks to a new construction called filter permutator. In this paper, we present an attack on the early version of FLIP that exploits the structure of the filter function and the constant internal state of the cipher. Applying this attack to the two instantiations proposed by Méaux et al. allows for a key recovery in $2^{54}$ basic operations (resp. $2^{68}$), compared to the claimed security of $2^{80}$ (resp. $2^{128}$).

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Stream Cipher, Guess-and-determine attack, FLIP, FHE

Date: received 10 Mar 2016

Contact author: virginie lallemand at inria fr

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20160310:181231 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2016/271