Paper 2018/1075

Rectangle and Impossible-differential Cryptanalysis on Versions of ForkAES

Jannis Bossert, Eik List, and Stefan Lucks

Abstract

The rapid distribution of lightweight devices raised the demand for efficient encryption and authenticated encryption schemes for small messages. For this purpose, Andreeva et al. recently proposed forkciphers, which fork the middle state within a cipher and encrypt it twice further under two smaller independent permutations. So, forkciphers can produce two output blocks which can allow to authenticate and encrypt small messages more efficiently. As instance of particular interest, Andreeva et al. proposed ForkAES, a tweakable forkcipher based on the AES-128 round function, which forks the state after five out of ten rounds. While their authenticated encrypted schemes were accompanied by proofs, the security discussion for ForkAES could not be covered in their work, and founded on existing results on the AES and KIASU-BC; so, the study of advanced differential attacks remained to be filled by the community. This work tries to foster the understanding of the security of ForkAES. It outlines a rectangle and an impossible-differential attack on nine rounds in the single-key related-tweak model; moreover, it describes a rectangle attack on ten rounds for a fraction of approximately $$ keys. We emphasize that our results do not break ForkAES in the single-key setting, but shed more light on its security margin.