Abstract
ACORN is a lightweight authenticated cipher which is one of the selected designs among the fifteen third round candidates. This is based on the underlying model of a stream cipher with 6 LFSRs of different lengths and three additional bits. In this paper we consider the scenario that certain amount of key stream bits and some portion of the state is known. Then we try to discover the rest of the state bits. For example, we show that the LFSR of length 47 can be recovered from 47 key stream bits and guessing the rest of the state bits. We also present the implication of such results towards mounting TMDTO attack on ACORN v3. We show that a TMDTO attack can be mounted with preprocessing complexity \(2^{171}\) and \(2^{180}\) (without and with the help of a SAT solver) and the maximum of online time, memory and data complexity \(2^{122}\) and \(2^{120}\) respectively. While our results do not refute any claim of the designer, these observations might be useful for further understanding of the cipher.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Babbage, S.: A space/time tradeoff in exhaustive search attacks on stream ciphers. In: European Convention on Security and Detection. IEEE Conference Publication, no. 408, May 1995
Biryukov, A., Shamir, A., Wagner, D.: Real time cryptanalysis of A5/1 on a PC. In: Goos, G., Hartmanis, J., van Leeuwen, J., Schneier, B. (eds.) FSE 2000. LNCS, vol. 1978, pp. 1–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44706-7_1
Biryukov, A., Shamir, A.: Cryptanalytic time/memory/data tradeoffs for stream ciphers. In: Okamoto, T. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2000. LNCS, vol. 1976, pp. 1–13. Springer, Heidelberg (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44448-3_1
Golić, J.D.: Cryptanalysis of alleged A5 stream cipher. In: Fumy, W. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1233, pp. 239–255. Springer, Heidelberg (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-69053-0_17
Hamann, M., Krause, M., Meier, W.: LIZARD - a lightweight stream cipher for power-constrained devices. In: FSE 2017. http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/926, http://tosc.iacr.org/index.php/ToSC/article/view/584
Maitra, S., Sinha, N., Siddhanti, A., Anand, R., Gangopadhyay, S.: A TMDTO attack against lizard (2017). http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/647
SAGE Mathematics Software. Free Software Foundation Inc. (2009). http://www.sagemath.org. (Open source project initiated by W. Stein and contributed by many)
Sarkar, S., Banik, S., Maitra, S.: Differential fault attack against grain family with very few faults and minimal assumptions. IEEE Trans. Comput. 64(6), 1647–1657 (2015)
Wu, H.: ACORN: a lightweight authenticated cipher (v3). https://competitions.cr.yp.to/round3/acornv3.pdf
Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank Department of Science and Technology DST-FIST Level-1 Program Grant No. SR/FST/MSI-092/2013 for providing the computational facilities.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Siddhanti, A.A., Maitra, S., Sinha, N. (2017). Certain Observations on ACORN v3 and the Implications to TMDTO Attacks. In: Ali, S., Danger, JL., Eisenbarth, T. (eds) Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering. SPACE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10662. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71501-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71501-8_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71500-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71501-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)