All subkeys recovery attack on block ciphers: Extending meet-in-the-middle approach

Abstract

We revisit meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on block ciphers. Despite recent significant improvements of the MITM attack, its application is still restrictive. In other words, most of the recent MITM attacks work only on block ciphers consisting of a bit permutation based key schedule such as KTANTAN, GOST, IDEA, XTEA, LED and Piccolo. In this paper, we extend the MITM attack so that it can be applied to a wider class of block ciphers. In our approach, MITM attacks on block ciphers consisting of a complex key schedule can be constructed. We regard all subkeys as independent variables, then transform the game that finds the user-provided key to the game that finds all independent subkeys. We apply our approach called all subkeys recovery (ASR) attack to block ciphers employing a complex key schedule such as CAST-128, SHACAL-2, KATAN, FOX128 and Blowfish, and present the best attacks on them with respect to the number of attacked rounds in literature. Moreover, since our attack is simple and generic, it is applied to the block ciphers consisting of any key schedule functions even if the key schedule is an ideal function. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.