Paper 2025/1227
Improved Key-recovery Attacks on ARADI
Abstract
ARADI is a low-latency block cipher introduced by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), targeting secure and efficient memory encryption. However, unlike most academic cipher proposals, the design rationale behind ARADI has not been made public, leaving its security to be only assessed through independent analysis. In this work, we present improved key-recovery attacks on up to 12 out of 16 rounds of ARADI in the single-key setting — advancing the best known attacks by two rounds. Our techniques build upon the ZeroSum distinguisher framework and leverage the Fast Hadamard Transform (FHT). A central insight in our attacks is that the linear layer of ARADI exhibits weak diffusion. This structural property allows partial decryption with only a subset of the round keys, significantly reducing the key-guessing space.
Note: Improved time complexities using hybrid partial sum and FHT-based technique
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Attacks and cryptanalysis
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- ARADILightweight CryptoFHT-based attack
- Contact author(s)
-
orrd @ cs haifa ac il
shibam ghosh @ inria fr - History
- 2026-01-26: revised
- 2025-07-02: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/1227
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1227,
author = {Orr Dunkelman and Shibam Ghosh},
title = {Improved Key-recovery Attacks on {ARADI}},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1227},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1227}
}
