Algebraic analysis of the simon block cipher family

Abstract

This paper focuses on algebraic attacks on the Simon family of block ciphers. We construct equation systems using multiple plaintext/ciphertext pairs, and show that many variables in the cipher states coming from different plaintexts are linearly related. A simple solving algorithm exploiting these relations is developed and extensively tested on the different Simon variants, giving efficient algebraic attacks on up to 16 rounds of the largest Simon variants.