Total Break of Zorro using Linear and Differential Attacks

Abstract. An AES-like lightweight block cipher, namely Zorro, was proposed in CHES 2013. While it has a 16-byte state, it uses only 4 S-Boxes per round. This weak nonlinearity was widely criticized, insofar as it has been directly exploited in all the attacks on Zorro reported by now, including the weak key, reduced round, and even full round attacks. In this paper, Using some observations discovered by Wang et. al., we present new differential and linear attacks on Zorro, both of which recover the full secret key with practical complexity. These attacks are based on very efficient distinguishers that have only two active sboxes per four rounds. The time complexity of our differential and linear attacks are 252.74 and 257.85 and the data complexity are 255.15 chosen plaintexts and 245.44 known plaintexts, respectively. The results clearly show that the block cipher Zorro does not have enough security against differential and linear cryptanalysis