Improved zero‐correlation and impossible differential cryptanalysis of reduced‐round SIMECK block cipher

Abstract

SIMECK is a family of three lightweight block ciphers designed by Yang et al., following the framework used by Beaulieu et al. from the United States National Security Agency to design SIMON and SPECK. In this study, the authors employ an improved miss-in-the-middle approach to find zero correlation linear distinguishers and impossible differentials on SIMECK48 and SIMECK64. Based on this novel technique, they will be able to present zero-correlation linear approximations for 15-round SIMECK48 and 17-round SIMECK64 and these zero-correlation linear approximations improve the previous best result by two rounds for SIMECK48 and SIMECK64. Moreover, they attack 27-round SIMECK48 and 31-round SIMECK64 based on these zero-correlation linear distinguishers. In addition, due to the duality of zero-correlation and impossible differential, they search for the impossible differential characteristics for SIMECK48 and SIMECK64 so that they will be able to present 15-round SIMECK48 and 17-round SIMECK64 while the best previously known results were 13-round impossible differentials for SIMECK48 and 15-round impossible differentials for SIMECK64. Moreover, they propose impossible differential attacks on 22-round SIMECK48 and 24-round SIMECK64 based on these impossible differential characteristics. The results significantly improve the previous zero correlation attack and impossible differential characteristic results for these variants of SIMECK to the best of the authors’ knowledge.