Improved differential attack on 30-round SIMON64

In this paper we present an attack on 30-round SIMON64, which improves the best results on SIMON64 by 1 round. We use a 23-round differential characteristic which was proposed by Itai et al in 2015 to construct a 30-round extended differential characteristized by adding 4 rounds on the top and 3 round on the bottom. Furthermore, we utilize all of the sufficient bit-conditions of the 30-round differential to compute a set of corresponding subkeys. Then we distribute the plaintext pairs over the 2⁸⁶ lists corresponding to the 86-bit subkeys. If a list contains two or more pairs, we regard the subkeys corresponding to the list as candidate subkeys. The time complexity of our attack on 30-round SIMON64/96 (SIMON64/128) is 2^86.2 (2^118.2) with a success probability of 0.61, while the data complexity and the memory complexity are 2^63.3 and 2⁹⁰ bytes, respectively.