Paper 2026/875

Comparative Performance Analysis of MILP Solvers for Cryptanalysis

Halil İbrahim Kaplan, TUBITAK BILGEM
Abstract

This paper provides a performance comparison of five MILP solvers applied to related-key differential cryptanalysis of ITUbee [10]. We evaluate three open-source solvers (GLPK, HiGHS, SCIP) and two commercial solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX) using MILP models for 8, 10, and 12-round attacks. As rounds increase, the number of equations and con- straints grows exponentially. Experiments used an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor with 32 GB of RAM. Commercial solvers (Gurobi and CPLEX) perform better than open-source options, achieving up to 94× speedup compared to GLPK for the 12-round model. This work provides guidance for choosing a solver for MILP-based cryptanalysis.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
CryptanalysisMILPDifferential CryptanalysisBlock Ciphers
Contact author(s)
halil kaplan @ tubitak gov tr
History
2026-05-08: approved
2026-05-05: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/875
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/875,
      author = {Halil İbrahim Kaplan},
      title = {Comparative Performance Analysis of {MILP} Solvers for Cryptanalysis},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/875},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/875}
}
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