Abstract
At CHES 2010, the new block cipher PRINTcipher was presented as a light-weight encryption solution for printable circuits [15]. The best attack to date is a differential attack [1] that breaks less than half of the rounds. In this paper, we will present a new attack called invariant subspace attack that breaks the full cipher for a significant fraction of its keys. This attack can be seen as a weak-key variant of a statistical saturation attack. For such weak keys, a chosen plaintext distinguishing attack can be mounted in unit time. In addition to breaking PRINTcipher, the new attack also gives us new insights into other, more well-established attacks. We derive a truncated differential characteristic with a round-independent but highly key-dependent probability. In addition, we also show that for weak keys, strongly biased linear approximations exists for any number of rounds. In this sense, PRINTcipher behaves very differently to what is usually – often implicitly – assumed.
Chapter PDF
References
Abdelraheem, M.A., Leander, G., Zenner, E.: Differential cryptanalysis of round-reduced PRINTcipher: Computing roots of permutations. In: Joux, A. (ed.) FSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6733, pp. 1–17. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Ben-Aroya, I., Biham, E.: Differential cryptanalysis of Lucifer. Journal of Cryptology 9(1), 21–34 (1996)
Bogdanov, A., Knudsen, L.R., Leander, G., Paar, C., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.J.B., Seurin, Y., Vikkelsoe, C.: PRESENT: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher. In: Paillier, P., Verbauwhede, I. (eds.) CHES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4727, pp. 450–466. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Bogdanov, A., Rechberger, C.: A 3-Subset Meet-in-the-Middle Attack: Cryptanalysis of the Lightweight Block Cipher KTANTAN. In: Biryukov, A., Gong, G., Stinson, D.R. (eds.) SAC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6544, pp. 229–240. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
De Cannière, C., Dunkelman, O., Knežević, M.: KATAN and KTANTAN — A Family of Small and Efficient Hardware-Oriented Block Ciphers. In: Clavier, C., Gaj, K. (eds.) CHES 2009. LNCS, vol. 5747, pp. 272–288. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Cho, J.Y.: Linear Cryptanalysis of Reduced-Round PRESENT. In: Pieprzyk, J. (ed.) CT-RSA 2010. LNCS, vol. 5985, pp. 302–317. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Collard, B., Standaert, F.-X.: A Statistical Saturation Attack against the Block Cipher PRESENT. In: Fischlin, M. (ed.) CT-RSA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5473, pp. 195–210. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Collard, B., Standaert, F.-X.: Multi-trail Statistical Saturation Attacks. In: Zhou, J., Yung, M. (eds.) ACNS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6123, pp. 123–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Daemen, J., Peeters, M., van Assche, G., Rijmen, V.: Nessie proposal: NOEKEON (2000), http://gro.noekeon.org/Noekeon-spec.pdf
Daemen, J., Rijmen, V.: Plateau characteristics. Information Security, IET 1(1), 11–17 (2007)
Dinur, I., Shamir, A.: Breaking grain-128 with dynamic cube attacks. In: Joux, A. (ed.) FSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6733, pp. 167–187. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Harpes, C., Massey, J.L.: Partitioning Cryptanalysis. In: Biham, E. (ed.) FSE 1997. LNCS, vol. 1267, pp. 13–27. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Hong, D., Sung, J., Hong, S.H., Lim, J.-I., Lee, S.-J., Koo, B.-S., Lee, C.-H., Chang, D., Lee, J., Jeong, K., Kim, H., Kim, J.-S., Chee, S.: HIGHT: A New Block Cipher Suitable for Low-Resource Device. In: Goubin, L., Matsui, M. (eds.) CHES 2006. LNCS, vol. 4249, pp. 46–59. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Knellwolf, S., Meier, W., Naya-Plasencia, M.: Conditional Differential Cryptanalysis of NLFSR-Based Cryptosystems. In: Abe, M. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2010. LNCS, vol. 6477, pp. 130–145. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Knudsen, L.R., Leander, G., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.J.B.: PRINTcipher: A Block Cipher for IC-Printing. In: Mangard, S., Standaert, F.-X. (eds.) CHES 2010. LNCS, vol. 6225, pp. 16–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Lai, X., Massey, J.L., Murphy, S.: Markov Ciphers and Differential Cryptanalysis. In: Davies, D.W. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1991. LNCS, vol. 547, pp. 17–38. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)
Leander, G.: On Linear Hulls, Statistical Saturation Attacks, PRESENT and a Cryptanalysis of PUFFIN. In: Paterson, K.G. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2011. LNCS, vol. 6632, pp. 303–322. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Murphy, S.: The Effectiveness of the Linear Hull Effect. Technical report, RHUL-MA-2009-19 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 International Association for Cryptologic Research
About this paper
Cite this paper
Leander, G., Abdelraheem, M.A., AlKhzaimi, H., Zenner, E. (2011). A Cryptanalysis of PRINTcipher: The Invariant Subspace Attack. In: Rogaway, P. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2011. CRYPTO 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6841. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22792-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22792-9_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22791-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22792-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)