Abstract
Nimbus is a block cipher submitted as a candidate to the NESSIE project by Alexis Machado. Like many other ciphers Nimbus combines multiplication operations with XOR operations, a common technique to protect against various kinds of cryptanalysis. In this paper we present two new differential properties of multiplication operations with probability about 1/2 which we use to design a one-round iterative characteristic of Nimbus. We iterate it to a characteristic of the full cipher with probability 1/32, which in turn we use to attack the full cipher and find all the key material using 256 chosen plaintexts and 210 complexity. Thus, we show that the inclusion of multiplication operations in a cipher does not necessarily protect against attacks.
The work described in this paper has been supported by the European Commission through the IST Programme under Contract IST-1999-12324 and by the fund for the promotion of research at the Technion.
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References
Eli Biham, Adi Shamir, Differential Cryptanalysis of the Data Encryption Standard, Springer Verlag, 1993.
Alexis Warner Machado, The Nimbus Cipher: A Proposal for NESSIE, NESSIE Proposal, September 2000.
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Furman, V. (2002). Differential Cryptanalysis of Nimbus. In: Matsui, M. (eds) Fast Software Encryption. FSE 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2355. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45473-X_16
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