Abstract
Secure lightweight block ciphers have become an important aspect due to the fact that they are a popular choice for providing security in ubiquitous devices. Two of the most important attacks on block ciphers are differential cryptanalysis [1] and linear cryptanalysis [2]. Calculating the number of active S-boxes is one of the method to examine the security of block ciphers against differential attack. In this paper, we count the minimum number of active S-boxes for several rounds of the lightweight ciphers namely KLEIN, LED and AES. We utilized the method proposed in [9], where calculation of the minimum number of active S-boxes is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem. The objective function is to minimize the number of active S-boxes, subject to the constraints imposed by the differential propagation of the cipher. The experimental results are presented in this paper and found to be encouraging.
Highlights
In recent years, designing cryptographic primitives has gathered attention from the research community which are used in resource constrained devices
For differential and linear cryptanalysis, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) can be used to solve the problem of determining the minimum no. of differentially/linearly active S-boxes which in turn can be used to search for the best differential/linear characteristic for an r-round block cipher
The minimum number of active S-boxes for differential cryptanalysis is calculated by solving an MILP problem
Summary
In recent years, designing cryptographic primitives has gathered attention from the research community which are used in resource constrained devices. This field of research is termed as lightweight cryptography. The method which is used to construct as well as solve such problems is called Mixed Integer Linear Programming(MILP). These techniques have built many real-time scenarios in the area of business and economy, but their applications in cryptology have been limited. The minimum number of active S-boxes for differential cryptanalysis (and the security bounds against this attack) is calculated by solving an MILP problem
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