Abstract
The area of lightweight cryptography, i.e., ciphers with particularly low implementation costs, has drawn considerable attention over the last few years. PRINCE is a lightweight block cipher proposed by J. Borghoff et al. at ASIACRYPT 2012. In 2017, Ding et al. constructed a 4-round truncated impossible differential distinguisher. They treat S-boxes as ideal ones that any nonzero input difference could produce any nonzero output difference. Obviously, this is not true for the S-boxes in the real block ciphers. In this paper, after investigating the properties of both the S-box and the linear layer of PRINCE, we construct two types of 5-round impossible differential distinguishers. Then we exhibit two types of key-recovery attacks on 9 out of 12 rounds of PRINCEcore. The corresponding data complexities are \(2^{53.3}\) and \(2^{56.1}\) chosen plaintexts, respectively. Our results are the best impossible differential cryptanalysis on PRINCE as far as we know to date, and our attacks meet the security claims of the designers.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bogdanov, A., et al.: PRESENT: an ultra-lightweight block cipher. In: Paillier, P., Verbauwhede, I. (eds.) CHES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4727, pp. 450–466. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74735-2_31
Beaulieu, R., Shors, D., Smith, J., et al.: The Simon and Speck lightweight block ciphers. In: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA, 7–11 June 2015, pp. 175: 1–175: 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2744769.2747946
Banik, S., et al.: Midori: a block cipher for low energy. In: Iwata, T., Cheon, J.H. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2015. LNCS, vol. 9453, pp. 411–436. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48800-3_17
Borghoff, J., et al.: PRINCE – a low-latency block cipher for pervasive computing applications. In: Wang, X., Sako, K. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2012. LNCS, vol. 7658, pp. 208–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34961-4_14
Kilian, J., Rogaway, P.: How to protect DES against exhaustive key search (an analysis of DESX). J. Cryptol. 14(1), 17–35 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/s001450010015
Soleimany, H., et al.: Reflection cryptanalysis of PRINCE-like ciphers. In: Moriai, S. (ed.) FSE 2013. LNCS, vol. 8424, pp. 71–91. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43933-3_5
Jean, J., Nikolić, I., Peyrin, T., Wang, L., Wu, S.: Security analysis of PRINCE. In: Moriai, S. (ed.) FSE 2013. LNCS, vol. 8424, pp. 92–111. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43933-3_6
Zhao, G., Sun, B., Li, C., et al.: Truncated differential cryptanalysis of PRINCE. Secur. Commun. Netw. 8(16), 2875–2887 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1002/sec.1213
Ding, Y.L., Zhao, J.Y., Li, L.B., et al.: Impossible differential analysis on round-reduced prince. J. Inf. Sci. Eng. 33(4), 1041–1053 (2017)
Ding, Y., Jia, K., Wang, A., Shi, Y.: Impossible differential analysis on 8-round PRINCE. In: Liu, Q., Liu, X., Li, L., Zhou, H., Zhao, H.-H. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Engineering and Networks. AISC, vol. 1143, pp. 383–395. Springer, Singapore (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3753-0_37
Li, L., Jia, K., Wang, X.: Improved meet-in-the-middle attacks on AES-192 and PRINCE. In: IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2013/573 (2013)
Farzaneh, A., Eik, L., Stefan, L.: On the security of the core of prince against biclique and differential cryptanalysis. In: IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2012/712 (2012)
Knudsen, L.: DEAL-a 128-bit block cipher. Complexity 258(2), 216 (1998)
Biham, E., Biryukov, A., Shamir, A.: Cryptanalysis of skipjack reduced to 31 rounds using impossible differentials. In: Stern, J. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1999. LNCS, vol. 1592, pp. 12–23. Springer, Heidelberg (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48910-X_2
Daemen, J., Rijmen, V.: The Design of Rijndael: AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard. Information Security and Cryptography, Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04722-4
Aoki, K., et al.: Camellia: a 128-bit block cipher suitable for multiple platforms—design and analysis. In: Stinson, D.R., Tavares, S. (eds.) SAC 2000. LNCS, vol. 2012, pp. 39–56. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44983-3_4
Wu, W., Zhang, L.: LBlock: a lightweight block cipher. In: Lopez, J., Tsudik, G. (eds.) ACNS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6715, pp. 327–344. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21554-4_19
Kanda, M., Matsumoto, T.: Security of camellia against truncated differential cryptanalysis. In: Matsui, M. (ed.) FSE 2001. LNCS, vol. 2355, pp. 286–299. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_24
Sun, B., et al.: Links among impossible differential, integral and zero correlation linear cryptanalysis. In: Gennaro, R., Robshaw, M. (eds.) CRYPTO 2015. LNCS, vol. 9215, pp. 95–115. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47989-6_5
Wang, Q., Jin, C.: Upper bound of the length of truncated impossible differentials for AES. Des. Codes Crypt. 86(7), 1541–1552 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-017-0411-z
Wang, Q., Jin, C.: More accurate results on the provable security of AES against impossible differential cryptanalysis. Des. Codes Crypt. 87(12), 3001–3018 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-019-00660-7
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62072445). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, L., Wu, W., Mao, Y. (2023). Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis on Reduced-Round PRINCEcore. In: Seo, SH., Seo, H. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2022. ICISC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13849. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29371-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29371-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-29370-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-29371-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)