Truncated Differential Attacks: New Insights and 10-round Attacks on QARMA

Truncated differential attacks were introduced by Knudsen in 1994 [1]. They are a well-known family that has arguably received less attention than some other variants of differential attacks. This paper gives some new insight on truncated differential attacks and provides the best-known attacks on both variants of the lightweight cipher QARMA, in the single tweak model, reaching for the first time 10 rounds while contradicting the security claims of this reduced version. These attacks use some new truncated distinguishers as well as some evolved key-recovery techniques