Abstract
Lightweight cryptography aims to design secure and efficient cryptographic algorithms for resource-constrained devices. Traditional cryptographic algorithms may not be readily usable in resource-constrained environments. To standardise cryptographic solutions tailored for such resource-constraint environments, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) project. Grain-128AEAD is a stream cipher-based finalist in the NIST LWC project. In this work, we examine the security of the initial version of Grain-128AEAD against cube attacks. We present distinguishing attacks on a reduced-round version of the cipher, assuming that the keystream can be observed immediately after the reduced-round initialisation of the pre-output generator. We obtained various cubes of sizes 25 to 45 for reduced-round Grain-128AEAD. The best cube reported in this work can distinguish the output of a 165-round initialisation of Grain-128AEAD with a cube size of 35. The complexity of the distinguishing attack is \(\mathcal {O}(2^{35})\). The results are confirmed experimentally. We conclude that even with fewer rounds of initialisation for the first version of Grain-128AEAD, the cipher still has a good security margin against cube attacks.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia through the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS), project no. FRGS/1/2021/ICT07/XMU/02/1, as well as the Xiamen University Malaysia Research Fund under Grants XMUMRF/2019-C3/IECE/0005 and XMUMRF/2022-C9/IECE/0032.
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Appendix A Additional Results for Cube Size \({\boldsymbol{\ell }}_{\boldsymbol{c}}\) = 25
Appendix A Additional Results for Cube Size \({\boldsymbol{\ell }}_{\boldsymbol{c}}\) = 25
A list of other cube testers obtained for a cube size of \(\ell _{c} = 25\) for reduced rounds r in between 129 to 160 are shown in Table 7.
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Teng, W.L., Salam, I., Yau, WC., Teh, J.Y. (2024). Cube Attacks on Round-Reduced Grain-128AEAD. In: Miraz, M.H., Southall, G., Ali, M., Ware, A. (eds) Emerging Technologies in Computing. iCETiC 2023. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 538. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50215-6_8
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