Cryptanalysis of SKINNY in the Framework of the SKINNY 2018–2019 Cryptanalysis Competition

Abstract

In April 2018, Beierle et al. launched the 3rd SKINNY cryptanalysis competition, a contest that aimed at motivating the analysis of their recent tweakable block cipher SKINNY. In contrary to the previous editions, the focus was made on practical attacks: contestants were asked to recover a 128-bit secret key from a given set of plaintext blocks. The suggested SKINNY instances are 4- to 20-round reduced variants of SKINNY-64-128 and SKINNY-128-128. In this paper, we explain how to solve the challenges for 10-round SKINNY-128-128 and for 12-round SKINNY-64-128 in time equivalent to roughly simple operations. Both techniques benefit from the highly biased sets of messages that are provided and that actually correspond to the encryption of various books in ECB mode.