Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on Crypton and mCrypton

• Jingyi Cui,
• Jiansheng Guo,
• Yanyan Huang,
• Yipeng Liu,

Vol. 11, No. 5, May 30, 2017
10.3837/tiis.2017.05.020, Download Paper (Free):

• cryptanalysis
• Crypton
• mCrypton
• meet-in-the-middle attack
• generalized δ-set
• differential enumeration

Abstract

Crypton is a SP-network block cipher that attracts much attention because of its excellent performance on hardware. Based on Crypton, mCrypton is designed as a lightweight block cipher suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The security of Crypton and mCrypton under meet-in-the-middle attack is analyzed in this paper. By analyzing the differential properties of cell permutation, several differential characteristics are introduced to construct generalized δ-sets. With the usage of a generalized δ-set and differential enumeration technique, a 6-round meet-in-the-middle distinguisher is proposed to give the first meet-in-the-middle attack on 9-round Crypton-192 and some improvements on the cryptanalysis of 10-round Crypton-256 are given. Combined with the properties of nibble permutation and substitution, an improved meet-in-the-middle attack on 8-round mCrypton is proposed and the first complete attack on 9-round mCrypton-96 is proposed.

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