An Easy-to-Use Tool for Rotational-XOR Cryptanalysis of ARX Block Ciphers

An increasing number of lightweight cryptographic primitives have been published recently. Some of these proposals are ARX primitives, which have shown a great performance in software. Rotational-XOR cryptanalysis is a statistical technique to attack ARX primitives. As opposed to rotational cryptanalysis, rotational-XOR cryptanalysis can deal with ARX primitives where constants are injected into the state. In this paper, a computer tool to speed up and make easier the security evaluation of ARX block ciphers against rotational-XOR cryptanalysis is shown. In particular, our tool takes a Python implementation of an ARX block cipher and automatically finds an optimal rotational-XOR characteristic. Compared to most of the automated tools, which only support a small set of primitives, our tool supports any ARX block cipher and it is executed with a simple shell command.

Publication year:2017

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

BOF-publication weight:1

CSS-citation score:1

Authors:International

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open