Boosting Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis of ChaCha7 with MILP
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46586/tosc.v2023.i2.189-223Keywords:
Cryptanalysis, Differential-Linear Attack, ChaCha20Abstract
In this paper, we present an improved differential-linear cryptanalysis of the ChaCha stream cipher. Our main contributions are new differential-linear distinguishers that we were able to build thanks to the following improvements: a) we considered a larger search space, including 2-bit differences (besides 1-bit differences) for the difference at the beginning of the differential part of the differential-linear trail; b) a better choice of mask between the differential and linear parts; c) a carefully crafted MILP tool that finds linear trails with higher correlation for the linear part. We eventually obtain a new distinguisher for ChaCha reduced to 7 rounds that requires 2166.89 computations, improving the previous record (ASIACRYPT 2022) by a factor of 247. Also, we obtain a distinguisher for ChaCha reduced to 7.5 rounds that requires 2251.4 computations, being the first time of a distinguisher against ChaCha reduced to 7.5 rounds. Using our MILP tool, we also found a 5-round differential-linear distinguisher. When combined with the probabilistic neutral bits (PNB) framework, we obtain a key-recovery attack on ChaCha reduced to 7 rounds with a computational complexity of 2206.8, improving by a factor 214.2 upon the recent result published at EUROCRYPT 2022.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Emanuele Bellini, David Gerault, Juan Grados, Rusydi H. Makarim, Thomas Peyrin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.