An experimentally verified attack on full Grain-128 using dedicated reconfigurable hardware

Itai Dinur, Tim Güneysu, Christof Paar, Adi Shamir, Ralf Zimmermann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

51 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we describe the first single-key attack which can recover the full key of the full version of Grain-128 for arbitrary keys by an algorithm which is significantly faster than exhaustive search (by a factor of about 238). It is based on a new version of a cube tester, which uses an improved choice of dynamic variables to eliminate the previously made assumption that ten particular key bits are zero. In addition, the new attack is much faster than the previous weak-key attack, and has a simpler key recovery process. Since it is extremely difficult to mathematically analyze the expected behavior of such attacks, we implemented it on RIVYERA, which is a new massively parallel reconfigurable hardware, and tested its main components for dozens of random keys. These tests experimentally verified the correctness and expected complexity of the attack, by finding a very significant bias in our new cube tester for about 7.5% of the keys we tested. This is the first time that the main components of a complex analytical attack are successfully realized against a full-size cipher with a special-purpose machine. Moreover, it is also the first attack that truly exploits the configurable nature of an FPGA-based cryptanalytical hardware.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology, ASIACRYPT 2011 - 17th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, Proceedings
Pages327-343
Number of pages17
DOIs
StatePublished - 12 Dec 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event17th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2011 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 4 Dec 20118 Dec 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7073 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2011
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period4/12/118/12/11

Keywords

  • Grain-128
  • RIVYERA
  • cryptanalysis
  • cube attacks
  • cube testers
  • experimental verification
  • stream cipher

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science (all)

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