Impossible differential cryptanalysis of reduced-round tweakable twine

Abstract

Tweakable TWINE (T-TWINE) is a new lightweight tweakable block cipher family proposed by Sakamoto et al. at IWSEC 2019. T-TWINE is the first Tweakable Block Cipher (TBC) that is built on Generalized Feistel Structure (GFS). It is based on the TWINE block cipher in addition to a simple tweak scheduling based on SKINNY’s tweakey schedule. Similar to TWINE, it has two versions, namely, T-TWINE-80 and T-TWINE-128, both have a block length of 64 bits and employ keys of length 80 and 128 bits, respectively. In this paper, we present impossible differential attacks against reduced-round versions of T-TWINE-80 and T-TWINE-128. First, we present an 18-round impossible differential distinguisher against T-TWINE. Then, using this distinguisher, we attack 25 and 27 rounds of T-TWINE-80 and T-TWINE-128, respectively.