Paper 2025/1801 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1801 ↗

Quantum Circuit Implementation and Resource Analysis of AIM2

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a quantum circuit implementation of AIM2. We apply optimization to reduce the circuit depth and introduce a method to reuse qubits by performing inverse operations in parallel. For all AIM2 variants (AIM2-I, AIM2-III, AIM2-V), we design quantum circuits for $\mathsf{Mer}^{-1}$, the linear layer, $\mathsf{Mer}$, and feed-forward. We confirm that the $\mathsf{Mer}^{-1}$ operation dominates the overall cost. Compared to the previous version of AIM, AIM2 requires significantly more quantum resources since it introduces $\mathsf{Mer}^{-1}$ before the linear layer. Based on the proposed circuits, we estimate the cost of Grover's algorithm for key search and compare it with the NIST estimates for AES. As a result, AIM2-I, AIM2-III, and AIM2-V achieve the post-quantum security levels of Level-1, Level-3, and Level-5, respectively.