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Improved meet-in-the-middle attacks on reduced-round Piccolo

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Abstract

Piccolo is a lightweight block cipher that adopts a generalized Feistel network structure with 4 branches, each of which is 16 bit long. The key length is 80 or 128 bit, denoted by Piccolo-80 and Piccolo-128, respectively. In this paper, we mounted meet-in-the-middle attacks on 14-round Piccolo-80 without preand post-whitening keys and 18-round Piccolo-128 with post-whitening keys by exploiting the properties of the key schedule and Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) matrix. For Piccolo-80, we first constructed a 5-round distinguisher. Then 4 rounds and 5 rounds were appended at the beginning and at the end, respectively. Based on this structure, we mounted an attack on 14-round Piccolo-80 from the 5th round to the 18th round. The data, time, and memory complexities were 252 chosen plaintexts, 267.44 encryptions, and 264.91 blocks, respectively. For Piccolo-128, we built a 7-round distinguisher to attack 18-round Piccolo-128 from the 4th round to the 21st round. The data, time, and memory complexities were 252 chosen plaintexts, 2126.63 encryptions, and 2125.29 blocks, respectively. If not considering results on biclique cryptanalysis, these are currently the best public results on this reduced version of the Piccolo block cipher.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61402288, 61672347, 61772129, 61472250), National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2013CB338004), Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 15ZR1400300, 16ZR1401100), Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 14ZZ066), Opening Project of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security(Grant No. AGK201703). The authors are grateful to Dr. Lei WANG and the reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Ya Liu & Liang Cheng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box, 5159, Beijing, 100878, China

    Ya Liu & Zhiqiang Liu

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Ya Liu, Zhiqiang Liu, Qingju Wang & Dawu Gu

  4. School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Wei Li

  5. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Wei Li

  6. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, 2800, Denmark

    Qingju Wang

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  1. Ya Liu
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  2. Liang Cheng
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  3. Zhiqiang Liu
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  4. Wei Li
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Correspondence to Wei Li.

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Liu, Y., Cheng, L., Liu, Z. et al. Improved meet-in-the-middle attacks on reduced-round Piccolo. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 61, 032108 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-016-9157-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-016-9157-y

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