RP012 Mastering Block Cipher Cryptanalysis: Techniques & Insights 🔐

by THAM LI JING

Block cipher is one of the examples of modern symmetric cipher types. Block cipher performs the operations on a block of data at a time. The main purpose of block cipher is for data encryption usage. In order to be used for real life application, a new block cipher must undergo third party cryptanalysis. BORON, a new lightweight block cipher that introduced by Bansod in 2017 which still lacks of cryptanalysis that work on it. In the prior differential cryptanalysis of BORON, the satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver is used without consider differentials (cluster of individual differential trails). Larger differentials will have higher differential probabilities, which leads to more efficient key recovery attacks.

This research project aims to produce new differential cryptanalysis results for BORON. The goal of this research project is to identify the differentials with high probability that can be used for statistical attacks. Method used in this research project is a branch-and-bound meet-in-the-middle search that will be adapted to BORON’s structure. This research project is expected to discover the optimal differentials with the highest probability to date that can be used for key recovery attack and launch a key recovery attack on BORON with improved complexity.