Abstract
The block cipher XTEA, designed by Needham and Wheeler, was published as a technical report in 1997. The cipher was a result of fixing some weaknesses in the cipher TEA (also designed by Wheeler and Needham), which was used in Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. XTEA is a 64-round Feistel cipher with a block size of 64 bits and a key size of 128 bits. In this paper, we present meet-in-the-middle attacks on twelve variants of the XTEA block cipher, where each variant consists of 23 rounds. Two of these require only 18 known plaintexts and a computational effort equivalent to testing about 2117 keys, with a success probability of 1 − 2− 1025. Under the standard (single-key) setting, there is no attack reported on 23 or more rounds of XTEA, that requires less time and fewer data than the above. This paper also discusses a variant of the classical meet-in-the-middle approach. All attacks in this paper are applicable to XETA as well, a block cipher that has not undergone public analysis yet. TEA, XTEA and XETA are implemented in the Linux kernel.
This work was supported in part by the Research Council K.U.Leuven: GOA TENSE, and by the IAP Program P6/26 BCRYPT of the Belgian State (Belgian Science Policy), and in part by the European Commission through the ICT program under contract ICT-2007-216676 ECRYPT II.
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Sekar, G., Mouha, N., Velichkov, V., Preneel, B. (2011). Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on Reduced-Round XTEA. In: Kiayias, A. (eds) Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 2011. CT-RSA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6558. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19074-2_17
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