Abstract
We discuss the impossible differential cryptanalysis of the block cipher Zodiac [7]. The main design principles of Zodiac are simplicity and efficiency. However the diffusion layer in its round function is too simple to offer enough security. An impossible differential cryptanalysis is a proper method to attack the weakness of Zodiac. Our attack using two 14-round impossible characteristics derives 128-bit master key of the full 16-round Zodiac with its complexity 2119 encryption times faster than the exhaustive search. The efficiency of the attack compared with exhaustive search increases as the key size increases.
This work is supported in part by the Ministry of Information & Communication of Korea (“Support Project of University Information Technology Research Center” supervised by IITA)
Chapter PDF
References
I. Ben-Aroya and E. Biham, Differential Cryptanalysis of Lucifer, Journal of Cryptology, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 21–34, 1996.
E. Biham, A. Biryukov, and A. Shamir, Cryptanalysis of skipjack reduced to 31 rounds using impossible differentials, Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT’99, LNCS 1592, Springer-Verlag, 1999, pp. 12–23.
E. Biham and A. Shamir, Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems, Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO’90, LNCS 537, Springer-Verlag, 1991, pp. 2–21.
L. Brown, J. Pieprzyk, and J. Seberry, LOKI-A cryptographic primitive for authentication and secrecy applications, Advances in Cryptology — AUSCRYPT’90, LNCS 453, pp. 229–236, Springer-Verlag, 1990.
L. R. Knudsen, Truncated and Higher Order Differential, Fast Software Encryption Workshop 94, LNCS 1008, pp. 229–236, Springer-Verlag, 1995.
L. R. Knudsen and T. Jakobsen, The Interpolation Attack on Block Ciphers, Fast Software Encryption Workshop 97, LNCS 1267, pp. 28–40, Springer-Verlag, 1997.
ChangHyi Lee, KyungHwa Jun, MinSuk Jung, SangBae Park, and JongDeok Kim, Zodiac Version 1.0(revised) Architecture and Specification, Standardization Workshop on Information Security Technology 2000, Korean Contribution on MP18033, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC27 N2563, 2000, Available at the KISA’s web page, http://www.kisa.or.kr/seed/index.html.
S. Moriai, T. Shimoyama, and T. Kaneko, Higher Order Differential Attack of a CAST cipher, Fast Software Encryption Workshop 98, LNCS 1372, pp. 17–31, Springer-Verlag, 1998.
B. Van Rompay, L. R. Knudsen, and V. Rijmen, Differential cryptanalysis of the ICE encryption algorithm, Fast Software Encryption Workshop 98, LNCS 1372, pp. 270–283, Springer-Verlag, 1998.
A. Shimizu and S. Miyaguchi, Fast Data Encipherment Algorithm FEAL, Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT’87, LNCS 304, pp. 267–278, Springer-Verlag, 1988.
D. Wagner, The boomerang attack, Fast Software Encryption Workshop 99, LNCS 1636, pp. 156–170, Springer-Verlag, 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hong, D., Sung, J., Moriai, S., Lee, S., Lim, J. (2002). Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of Zodiac. In: Matsui, M. (eds) Fast Software Encryption. FSE 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2355. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43869-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45473-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive