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Fast correlation attack on stream cipher ABC v3

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Abstract

ABC v3 is a stream cipher submitted to the ECRYPT eStream project and has entered the second evaluation phase. Its key length is 128 bits. In this paper, we find large numbers of new weak keys of ABC family and introduce a method to search for them, and then apply a fast correlation attack to break ABC v3 with weak keys. We show that there are at least 2103.71 new weak keys in ABC v3. Recovering the internal state of a weak key requires 236.05 keystream words and 250.56 operations. The attack can be applied to ABC v1 and v2 with the same complexity as that of ABC v3. However, the number of weak keys of ABC v1 as well as ABC v2 decreases to 297 + 295.19. It reveals that ABC v3 incurs more weak keys than that of ABC v1 and v2.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Cryptographic Technology and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong University, Jinan, 250100, China

    HaiNa Zhang, Lin Li & XiaoYun Wang

  2. Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    XiaoYun Wang

Authors
  1. HaiNa Zhang
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  2. Lin Li
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  3. XiaoYun Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to XiaoYun Wang.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 90604036 and 60525201) and the 973 Project (Grant No. 2007CB807902)

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Zhang, H., Li, L. & Wang, X. Fast correlation attack on stream cipher ABC v3. Sci. China Ser. F-Inf. Sci. 51, 936–947 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-008-0064-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-008-0064-7

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