Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis of GIFT family and GIFT-based Ciphers

Shichang Wang; Meicheng Liu; Shiqi Hou; Dongdai Lin

Paper 2025/1931

Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis of GIFT family and GIFT-based Ciphers

Shichang Wang, Nanyang Technological University

Meicheng Liu, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS

Shiqi Hou, Tsinghua University

Dongdai Lin, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS

Abstract

At CHES 2017, Banik et al. proposed a lightweight block cipher GIFT consisting of two versions GIFT-64 and GIFT-128. Recently, there are lots of authenticated encryption schemes that adopt GIFT-128 as their underlying primitive, such as GIFT-COFB and HyENA. To promote a comprehensive perception of the soundness of the designs, we evaluate their security against differential-linear cryptanalysis. For this, automatic tools have been developed to search differential-linear approximation for the ciphers based on S-boxes. With the assistance of the automatic tools, we find 13-round differential-linear approximations for GIFT-COFB and HyENA. Based on the distinguishers, 18-round key-recovery attacks are given for the message processing phase and initialization phase of both ciphers. Moreover, the resistance of GIFT-64/128 against differential-linear cryptanalysis is also evaluated. The 12-round and 17-round differential-linear approximations are found for GIFT-64 and GIFT-128 respectively, which lead to 18-round and 19-round key-recovery attacks respectively. Here, we stress that our attacks do not threaten the security of these ciphers.

Note: This is the full version of the paper that appeared in IACR Communications in Cryptology, vol. 1, no. 1, April 9, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.62056/a6n5txol7

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: A major revision of an IACR publication in CIC 2024
DOI: 10.62056/a3n59qgxq
Keywords: Differential-linear attack GIFT GIFT-COFB HyENA
Contact author(s): shichang wang @ ntu edu sg
liumeicheng @ iie ac cn
seventeenhsq @ gmail com
ddlin @ iie ac cn
History: 2025-10-20: approved; 2025-10-16: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/1931
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1931,
      author = {Shichang Wang and Meicheng Liu and Shiqi Hou and Dongdai Lin},
      title = {Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis of {GIFT} family and {GIFT}-based Ciphers},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1931},
      year = {2025},
      doi = {10.62056/a3n59qgxq},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1931}
}