Algebraic Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on LowMC

  • Fukang Liu*
  • , Santanu Sarkar
  • , Gaoli Wang
  • , Willi Meier
  • , Takanori Isobe
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

By exploiting the feature of partial nonlinear layers, we propose a new technique called algebraic meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to analyze the security of LowMC, which can reduce the memory complexity of the simple difference enumeration attack over the state-of-the-art. Moreover, while an efficient algebraic technique to retrieve the full key from a differential trail of LowMC has been proposed at CRYPTO 2021, its time complexity is still exponential in the key size. In this work, we show how to reduce it to constant time when there are a sufficiently large number of active S-boxes in the trail. With the above new techniques, the attacks on LowMC and LowMC-M published at CRYPTO 2021 are further improved, and some LowMC instances could be broken for the first time. Our results seem to indicate that partial nonlinear layers are still not well-understood.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2022 - 28th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, 2022, Proceedings
EditorsShweta Agrawal, Dongdai Lin
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages225-255
Number of pages31
ISBN (Print)9783031229626
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event28th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2022 - Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: 5 Dec 20229 Dec 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume13791 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference28th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2022
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityTaipei
Period5/12/229/12/22

Keywords

  • Algebraic attack
  • Key recovery
  • Linearization
  • LowMC
  • LowMC-M
  • Meet-in-the-middle

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