Paper 2024/1133

Parameters of Algebraic Representation vs. Efficiency of Algebraic Cryptanalysis

Hossein Arabnezhad
Babak Sadeghiyan
Abstract

The aim of an algebraic attack is to find the secret key by solving a collection of relations that describe the internal structure of a cipher for observations of plaintext/cipher-text pairs. Although algebraic attacks are addressed for cryptanalysis of block and stream ciphers, there is a limited understanding of the impact of algebraic representation of the cipher on the efficiency of solving the resulting collection of equations. In this paper, we investigate on how different S-box representations affect the complexity of algebraic attacks, in an empirical manner. In the literature some algebraic properties are intuitively proposed to evaluate optimality of an algebraic description of S-boxes for algebraic cryptanalysis. In this paper, we compare different S-box representation for algebraic cryptanalysis with doing experiments with SR family of block ciphers. We also show that the so-called \textit{Forward-Backward} representation which is in contrast with all mentioned criteria for optimal representations criteria, practically gives better results than the compliant representations. We also compare the representations for both and fields.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Algebraic Cryptanalysis
Contact author(s)
arabnezhad @ aut ac ir
basadegh @ aut ac ir
History
2024-07-15: approved
2024-07-12: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/1133
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/1133,
      author = {Hossein Arabnezhad and Babak Sadeghiyan},
      title = {Parameters of Algebraic Representation vs. Efficiency of Algebraic Cryptanalysis},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/1133},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1133}
}
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