Cryptanalysis of Reduced-round SIMON32 and SIMON48

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. SIMON family is one of the recent lightweight block cipher designs introduced by NSA. So far there have been several cryptanalytic results on this cipher by means of differential, linear and impossible differential cryptanalysis. In this paper, we study the security of SIMON32, SIMON48/72 and SIMON48/96 by using integral, zero-correlation linear and impossible differential cryptanalysis. Firstly, we present a novel experimental approach to construct the best known integral distinguishers of SIMON32. The small block size, 32 bits, of SIMON32 enables us to experimentally find a 15-round integral distinguisher, based on which we present a key recovery attack on 21-round SIMON32, while previous best results only achieved 19 rounds. Moreover, we attack 20- round SIMON32, 20-round SIMON48/72 and 21-round SIMON48/96 based on 11 and 12-round zero-correlation linear hulls of SIMON32 and SIMON48 respectively. Finally, we propose new impossible differential attacks which improve the previous impossible differential attacks. Our analysis shows that SIMON maintains enough security margin.status: publishe