Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2022/137

Ten years of cube attacks

Marco Cianfriglia and Elia Onofri and Silvia Onofri and Marco Pedicini

Abstract: In 2009, Dinur and Shamir proposed the cube attack, an algebraic cryptanalysis technique that only requires black box access to a target cipher. Since then, this attack has received both many criticisms and endorsements from crypto community; this work aims at revising and collecting the many attacks that have been proposed starting from it. We categorise all of these attacks in five classes; for each class, we provide a brief summary description along with the state-of-the-art references and the most recent cryptanalysis results. Furthermore, we extend and refine the new notation we proposed in 2021 and we use it to provide a consistent definition for each attack family. Finally, in the appendix, we provide an in-depth description of the kite attack framework, a cipher independent tool we firstly proposed in 2018 that implements the kite attack on GPUs. To prove its effectiveness, we use Mickey2.0 as a use case, showing how to embed it in the framework.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Cryptanalysis, cube attacks, kite attack, algebraic attacks, GPU implementation, tweakable black box polynomials, division property, Mickey2.0

Date: received 7 Feb 2022

Contact author: eonofri at uniroma3 it

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20220209:085848 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2022/137