ROTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHACHA PERMUTATION

Abstract

We show that the underlying permutation of ChaCha20 stream cipher does not behave as a random permutation for up to 17 rounds with respect to rotational cryptanalysis. In particular, we derive a lower and an upper bound for the rotational probability through ChaCha quarter round, we show how to extend the bound to a full round and then to the full permutation. The obtained bounds show that the probability to find what we call a parallel rotational collision is, for example, less than 2−505 for 17 rounds of ChaCha permutation, while for a random permutation of the same input size, this probability is 2−511. We remark that our distinguisher is not an attack against the ChaCha20 stream cipher, but rather a theoretical analysis of its internal permutation from the point of view of rotational cryptanalysis. Whenever possible, our claims are supported by experiments.