New linear cryptanalysis of Chinese commercial block cipher standard SM4

Abstract

SM4 is a Chinese commercial block cipher standard used for wireless communication in China. In this paper, we use the partial linear approximation table of S-box to search for three rounds of iterative linear approximations of SM4, based on which the linear approximation for 20-round SM4 has been constructed. However, the best previous identified linear approximation only covers 19 rounds. At the sametime, a linear approximation for 19-round SM4 is obtained, which is better than the known results. Furthermore, we show the key recovery attack on 24-round SM4 which is the best attack according to the number of rounds.