Paper 2015/030 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2015/030 ↗

Cryptanalysis of Ascon

Christoph Dobraunig
Maria Eichlseder
Florian Mendel
Martin Schläffer
Abstract

We present a detailed security analysis of the CAESAR candidate Ascon. Amongst others, cube-like, differential and linear cryptanalysis are used to evaluate the security of Ascon. Our results are practical key-recovery attacks on round-reduced versions of Ascon-128, where the initialization is reduced to 5 out of 12 rounds. Theoretical key-recovery attacks are possible for up to 6 rounds of initialization. Moreover, we present a practical forgery attack for 3 rounds of the finalization, a theoretical forgery attack for 4 rounds finalization and zero-sum distinguishers for the full 12-round Ascon permutation. Besides, we present the first results regarding linear cryptanalysis of Ascon, improve upon the results of the design document regarding differential cryptanalysis, and prove bounds on the minimum number of (linearly and differentially) active S-boxes for the Ascon permutation.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2017-07-31: last updated
2015-01-14: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/030
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/030,
      author = {Christoph Dobraunig and Maria Eichlseder and Florian Mendel and Martin Schläffer},
      title = {Cryptanalysis of Ascon},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/030},
      year = {2015},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/030}
}
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