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Meet-in-the-middle attack with splice-and-cut technique and a general automatic framework

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Abstract

Computer aided cryptanalysis has been popular for recent several years, however, most of these automations are semi-automations which leave cryptographers to complete the remaining parts of the attack. This paper proposes an automatic framework towards optimal meet-in-the-middle attack with splice-and-cut technique(MITM-SCT). Compared with other automations on MITM attack, our framework is fully automatic which can take all the procedures of the attack into consideration. Firstly, with a newly introduced matrix-based method, a general framework is proposed to calculate the correlated states and illustrate the differential diffusion property in a MITM attack. Alongside, all the procedures of a typical MITM-SCT attack are reduced to three types of matrices. These matrices can be uniquely determined by the round function and the construction methods are presented. Secondly, based on the framework, a fully automatic searching method on MITM-SCT attack is proposed. Thirdly, an optimal searching strategy on MITM-SCT attack is proposed and the bound for the time complexity is illustrated. Based on our method, if the computing capability is large enough, we can search all the possible attack scenarios and the least upper bound for the target block cipher against MITM-SCT attack can be derived. That is to say, we cannot only find some better attack scenarios, but also try all the possible attack scenarios simultaneously to find the optimal ones for some cases. Finally, we apply our method to HIGHT, CHAM, WARP and derive some currently best-known MITM attacks on these ciphers. For HIGHT, we exhaustively search about 2.1 billion attack scenarios and derive 76.8 thousand 23-round MITM attacks on HIGHT, which is 4 rounds more than the current best MITM attack. For the CHAM family ciphers, some MITM attacks are proposed on 30-round, 19-round, 30-round CHAM-64/128, CHAM-128/128 and CHAM-128/256 respectively. These results can exceed most of the attacks in the single key setting proposed by the designers. For WARP, a concrete 19-round MITM attack is proposed. Our automatic method is proposed on solving the problem of MITM attacks on ARX ciphers, however, the successful attack on WARP indicates that our method can also be applied to Sbox-based block ciphers.

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All data included in this study are available upon reasonable request by contact with the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61802437, 61972248, 61902428, 62102448, 62202493, National Key Research and Development Program under Grant No. 2019YFB2101601, and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 2020M681314.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PLA SSF Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, China

    Kai Zhang, Jie Guan, Bin Hu, Senpeng Wang & Tairong Shi

  2. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Kai Zhang, Xuejia Lai & Lei Wang

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  1. Kai Zhang
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  2. Xuejia Lai
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Correspondence to Kai Zhang or Xuejia Lai.

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Zhang, K., Lai, X., Wang, L. et al. Meet-in-the-middle attack with splice-and-cut technique and a general automatic framework. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 91, 2845–2878 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-023-01226-4

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