Paper 2023/1944

Revisiting The Multiple of Property for SKINNY The Exact Computation of the number of right pairs

Abstract

At EUROCRYPT 2017, Grassi et al. proposed the multiple-of-8 property for 5-round AES, where the number $n$ of right pairs is a multiple of 8. At ToSC 2019, Boura et al. generalized the multiple-of property for a general SPN block cipher and applied it to block cipher SKINNY. In this paper, we present that $n$ is not only a multiple but also a fixed value for SKINNY. Unlike the previous proof of generalization of multiple-of property using equivalence class, we investigate the propagation of the set to compute the exact number $n$. We experimentally verified that presented property holds. We extend this property one round more using the lack of the whitening key on the SKINNY and use this property to construct 6-round distinguisher on SKINNY-64 and SKINNY-128. The probability of success of both distinguisher is almost 1 and the total complexities are $2^{16}$ and $2^{32}$ respectively. We verified that this property only holds for SKINNY, not for AES and MIDORI, and provide the conditions under which it exists for AES-like ciphers.