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Differential Attack on Five Rounds of the SC2000 Block Cipher*

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Abstract

The SC2000 block cipher has a 128-bit block size and a user key of 128, 192 or 256 bits, which employs a total of 6.5 rounds if a 128-bit user key is used. It is a CRYPTREC recommended e-government cipher in Japan. In this paper we address how to recover the user key from a few subkey bits of SC2000, and describe two 4.75-round differential characteristics with probability 2-126 of SC2000 and seventy-six 4.75-round differential characteristics with probability 2-127. Finally, we present a differential cryptanalysis attack on a 5-round reduced version of SC2000 when used with a 128-bit key; the attack requires 2125:68 chosen plaintexts and has a time complexity of 2125:75 5-round SC2000 encryptions. The attack does not threat the security of the full SC2000 cipher, but it suggests for the first time that the safety margin of SC2000 with a 128-bit key decreases below one and a half rounds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Ecole Normale Superieure, 45 Rue dˈUlm, Paris, 75005, France

    Ji-Qiang Lv

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  1. Ji-Qiang Lv
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Correspondence to Ji-Qiang Lv.

Additional information

This work as well as the author was supported by the French ANR Project SAPHIR II.

*A preliminary version appeared in post-proceedings of INSCRYPT 2009[1].

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Lv, JQ. Differential Attack on Five Rounds of the SC2000 Block Cipher* . J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 26, 722–731 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-011-1171-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-011-1171-2

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