Differential Cryptanalysis of K-Cipher

Mohammad Mahzoun; Liliya Kraleva; Raluca Posteuca; Tomer Ashur

Paper 2022/1158

Differential Cryptanalysis of K-Cipher

Mohammad Mahzoun

, Eindhoven University of Technology

Liliya Kraleva, KU Leuven

Raluca Posteuca, KU Leuven

Tomer Ashur, KU Leuven, Eindhoven University of Technology

Abstract

K-Cipher is an ultra-low latency block cipher with variable-length parameters designed by Intel Labs. In this work, we analyze the security of K-Cipher and propose a differential cryptanalysis attack with the complexity of $2^{29.7}$ for a variant of K-Cipher with state size $n=24$ bits state and block size $m=8$ bits. Our attack recovers the secret key and secret randomizer values with a total length of 240 bits in $\sim 30$ minutes on a standard desktop machine. We show that it is possible to extend the same attack for an arbitrary set of parameters.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE ISCC 2022
Keywords: differential cryptanalysis symmetric cryptography K-Cipher
Contact author(s): m mahzoun @ tue nl
liliya kraleva @ esat kuleuven be
raluca posteuca @ esat kuleuven be
tomer ashur @ esat kuleuven be
History: 2022-09-06: approved; 2022-09-06: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/1158
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1158,
      author = {Mohammad Mahzoun and Liliya Kraleva and Raluca Posteuca and Tomer Ashur},
      title = {Differential Cryptanalysis of K-Cipher},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/1158},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1158}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1158}
}